Embracing Change
Written in 2024, two months post hysterectomy.
My dog, Coco and I love to walk most mornings in Pukekura Park which has the perfect combination of mini lakes, greenery, mountain views and a waterfall. Coco is 50/50 with her enjoyment as the first half she needs to be on lead, but knows that we need to get through the lead part to make it to her freedom…the back of the park. Away from the busyness of others walking their children or dogs, older people dawdling slowly around on their way for coffee at the Kiosk and instead right into a thicker forest with a river that is often just mud. Perfect.
She sits before being released from her leash to run at full speed, darting in and out of the forest like a professional (except the time she got impaled by a stick - a story for another day). We never know what we are going to get as we enter this part of the park, sometimes the river is overflowing and almost covering the track, sometimes it is hardly there at all. On some days there is a heavy, damp smell in the air and on others the fresh green of the leaves makes it feel light and airy.
Recently, as I walked along the familiar path with Coco chasing a stick to my left, I looked up and saw multiple leaves gently fall to the ground at once, a perfectly silent drop in unison. It struck me that we are currently mid-Autumn, nature’s season of change. Now that I had noticed it, I saw leaves all around falling from their branches, released from their job they once held and now en route to something new - a familiar feeling to me at present. The leaves had been giving life to the world around them as they grew slowly but surely, life from the tree and to the atmosphere through themselves, until the time came where they hadn’t. I watched as they dropped to the ground and a wave of realisation hit me. Validation came as I saw myself in each leaf, pulled from what I knew and where I was able to feel life and offer it through mine in familiar, tried and true ways, now spiralling down with no way of returning to what was. Life as I knew it had died on the tree, it no longer fit anymore - I no longer fit in the same way anymore.
I watched as the dry, withered representation of myself continued down to hit the ground in its new home, and felt the impact of what I knew so well. The feeling of falling, of not knowing what is happening and where, when it will end and where I will land. The sense of my world being pulled away and knowing it will never be the same. And yet, as I walked and watched this pattern continue on the trees all around me, I couldn’t help but see how gently the leaves landed on the forest floor. No big crash landing, just a gentle and slow relax into where they now lay. It hit me that what looked like death to them, to their purpose and their place in the world may not be an accurate description. The leaves now lay as part of a new environment, a habitat providing protection and nutrients to the wildlife and critters all around them. In fact, was it just me overthinking or did these fallen dead, seemingly displaced leaves now all of a sudden have a vital new role to play in the park’s eco-system?
Their ability to become mulch, compost and food for the very tree they fell from seemed so obvious and beautiful as I watched. They had gone from withering and fading away, unable to contribute life to their surroundings any longer to falling and landing exactly where they were meant to be next, with a new purpose of now providing life once again. A transition from receiving to giving. It wasn’t glamorous, it was a new and lowly position amongst the mud and the damp forest floor, but it brought new purpose to what had been disconnected and removed. These dead leaves, laying at the base of their trees, with their entire lives they have known until now were now offering a sense of contentment and peace that hit me deep to my core.
Perhaps, this was the same cycle I had found myself in? Not living in the way I had always known and expected or able to fit in with my circumstances, but gently transitioned, albeit unwillingly, to a new place of purpose, much different than before but just beautiful.
