For the past year I've been visiting the same tree in a nearby park, taking note of every angle and every change…..the kite that landed in its top branches last summer and has yet to set itself free, the brilliant red of its leaves in fall, the twisting curves of its skeleton that were revealed as those leaves fell away. The tree became like an old friend, and its constant changes always led me to contemplate my own changing life. It amazed me each season to realize how different I had become, how much my life had changed since the season before it.
The short 2 years I've lived in Southern Connecticut have been the most dynamic and transformational years of my life, that is for sure. Before I arrived here I was a single girl always frustrated with her love life, I was taking the subway to work at an investment firm, a job that sucked away a piece of my passion and vitality every day, and living the city life in San Francisco. Although I have my fair share of challenges these days, I feel utterly blessed to have created an entirely different reality for myself in such a short span of time—I have fulfilling, supportive, loving relationships; I have a husband who loves me exactly the way I need to be loved; I have started an artistic career; I am nearly unrecognizable to my former self in terms of my psychology, maturity, and decision-making….and I'm heading off to live in the quiet mountains after 6 years of city living.
Perhaps I've stumbled upon one of the less obvious reasons I feel so connected to and inspired by nature—the growth and the constant changes mirror human life. We are the same basic structure, or set of branches, but we are never the same….our lives are a series of metamorphoses and it's really remarkable.
My visits to the tree over the past year:
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