Autumn, Change, Growth

The leaves burst forth with an iridescent crimson gleam. A silent gasp for a final applause. They drift, torn from home by wind gentle and violent alike, finding respite on the cold, muddy ground. There they wait. For boots to trudge over or for jubilant wellies to crush their scarlet symphony into the blue, crisp air.

The trees let go. The leaves fall away from all they know. They land anew, foreign and wait for a new fate, surrendering with defiant beauty to the changing of seasons and their own decay.

How unlike humans.

How unlike me.

I’ve met the greatest changes in my life on the cusp of autumn. The edges of summer bleeding into the colours of turning trees. I landed in university just before the season changed, but I was anything but gentle in my own metamorphosis. Tightly I clung to the old version of myself, desperately I tried to drag pieces of myself forward, forcing them to fit into a new reality where they really didn’t belong. As parts of me were taken, culled and trimmed, I resented each move and each redirection. So tightly did I want things to remain the same, over and over again I asked for a time gone by without knowing truly what that time even was.

I met Cambridge as the leaves burst forth in their rebellious swan song. I watched, during those first walks and trepidatious weeks, as leaves leaped from their branches and swung themselves down to the burnished pavements. I walked along Sidgwick Avenue into town and stared up at the maze of intertwining branches, growing more and more naked with each passing day.

The trees shed themselves to make room for rest – to make room for growth. I did neither. Again, I clung, holding onto dying and decaying parts of me and my heart. Rather than allowing a natural ebb and flow of pieces and self, I wrapped everything up in one and begged it to stay. When my skin begged for something to be let go, when it burst forth in its own angry array of colour, I just ran faster and further away from the necessary challenge – change. Growth.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if the trees never turned. Of course, we know some who never do. The ever-illusive evergreen comes to mind with its nearly eternal source of chlorophyll and its apparent needless trunk. The trees lining the tropics, basking in sun and bearing under hurricanes or monsoons, also seem adept at avoiding that crux of all existence: death that begets growth. I’m sure if I studied them on a cellular level, there I would see clearly the turnover, the dying strands that make space for new fresh life. While they may not experience the dramatic wilting and withering of northern autumnal topiary, I have to believe they bleed, they die, and they expand in that empty, graven space with new life.

This is what I have found in the seasons of life when I experienced the greatest change, moving continents and cultures for university and then again for married post grad life. Death to a version of self, came before the leaps and bounds of change. Without moving to university, I would have remained trapped as a child, and quite a cynical one. University allowed me to wear colour, to shed colour, to run, to literally sprint to a new sort of self, less tethered by familiar expectations and assumptions.

Moving to Cambridge, again in autumn, brought about perhaps the deepest death to self. The loss of nursing as a career, the complete loss of cultural identity and understanding, the leaf strewn ground swept out from under my feet day in and day out as I tried to survive. And with each month I had to learn grace for others, grace for myself, and cling to a deeper, desperate faith.

And the clearest – the autumnal season of my internal life – our miscarriage last year. I carried death within. I coaxed my body into following the trees in letting go. And as I did, as we wept and mourned the soul gone silent, the sky lit up in a brilliant, grief defying display of glory.

As terrible as it seems to say, if death had not existed and exited, the new life would not have had room to grow. Without surrender, without relinquishing an older version of self, of existence, I would not be who I am now, and our family would not be what it is. It seems barbaric to write, to acknowledge that death comes before life, and yet it is proven out in nature and in faith.

Leaves fall for new ones to grow.

Mothers grieve in order to welcome and rejoice.

We die to sin to live with Christ.

Over and over again, we see in ourselves and in the world around us, a need for change. It’s painful. It’s brutal. It’s nearly torturous to rip oneself cell from cell and allow oneself to be built again, renewed. Waiting for spring.

Do we thrive in change? No, I don’t think so. I think we’re culled and chopped down during seasons of change but it’s after the leaves settle, after the growing pains ease, we find ourselves emerging full and abundant with new life, new skills, new hopes and new light.

We do not thrive during change. We die during seasons of change. We thrive when we’re resurrected into new life, over and over again.

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As this is a TCK blog, it focuses on the cycles of change, grief, healing and settling that many TCKs face throughout their life. How has experiencing change impacted your life? How have you settled after grief? Do you believe that we thrive during change or stability, or both? Leave your answers in the comments below!