True colours
Photo of some pink and green sycamore (I think!) leaves on a small tree. In the background is a woodland scene.
I found this absolute beauty when I was walking the North Downs Way near Etchinghill in Kent. It broke into my peripheral vision in the distance to the right of my path. At first, it seemed like a ghostly apparition, then as if someone had poured paint on a tree. It was only upon closer inspection that I found it to be this absolutely gorgeous, alive and undamaged, wholly natural pink and green.
Without meaning any disrespect to any other tree I have seen (especially Harry, Isobel, the Dandag Sisters, Richard, and the yews), it was quite simply the most beautiful tree I have ever encountered. As I contemplated its beauty, I came to learn that this was the first time a tree had ever trusted me enough to show me its true colours. As I was to subsequently learn, trees are like flowers and come in a variety of colours; we get a taste of that truth in autumn.
A tree’s true colour is a bit like a person’s true name, as (accurately) described in Ursula Le Guin’s books of Earthsea: to know the name or the colour is to control the bearer or wearer. This is why trees are so hesitant to reveal themselves to us, and why, despite my singing love songs to my arboreal friends at least once a week, it has taken this long for one to trust me enough to show me its true colours.
Sometimes when I walk, I realise that life is such a gift. That all we need to do is to go outside and feel the wind and the rain and the sun on our skin. To hear the sounds of birds. Watch a rabbit scamper. Follow a butterfly’s flutter. Inspect the decaying corpse of a badger. All of these things are real and incredibly nourishing. When you put your face up close to a wildflower, you realise that you are one too, and that your wanderings are simply the scatterings of a different kind of seed. Every time you put a foot down, something new arises within.
The longer you are inside, the further away from this truth you are. The more you will come to think that your life is lived as an idea at the other end of a screen or inside someone else’s mind. In fact, what you really are is a body existing for a brief moment on an orb which is suspended in space. An orb of plenty. An orb which, even in the most boring and barren of places, keeps trying again for beauty, keeps on perpetuating life. There is always enough, and if you spend enough time outside you will come to know this in ways which provide a permanent buoyancy to your heart, even if it makes no objective sense to your mind.
Trees are pink. What a beautiful realisation! What luck I had that day to be present enough to notice the change in my peripheral vision. It makes me wonder how often we miss revelations like this. What else is speaking to us quietly of beauty in the corner of our vision? What else whispers under the chaos of our mind chatter? What else touches our shoulder or neck when we are slumped over a screen, too ‘busy’ to notice? People, go out for a walk today, go out for a wheel in your chair, and while you are doing so, be there. Watch, listen, smell, observe; communicate directly with the present moment. Then maybe, just maybe if you are lucky enough, a tree which has been watching you will take a risk and show you their true colours.
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