Tree on winter meditation 



What am I thinking about now?

I'm thinking about a tree, I see daily, outside my window. It belongs to the Betula Pendula species, commonly known by the name Silver Birch

It's reminding me of the beauty of a temporal transformation. When I was in Kerala, the facts of seasonal changes weren't something that affected my sense of reality much, because there I never got a chance to experience them in such sharp contrasts. But in South Africa we have all four seasons,from 1 June to 31 August it's winter. So right now it's winter here. After that from 1 September to 30 November it's spring and the summer starts on 1st December and ends by the end of February.

Here, I am watching the tree's transformation, as it happens daily.  I have captured two momentous points in its transformation through two photographs. Already by the beginning of the winter it started losing leaves and would stay in that state until the beginning of September, when the dormant shoots of leaves would be unfurling and by the beginning of December it would mature into a fully fledged tree.



Silver Birch dressed up in summer 



My free writing starts now:

It's not a huge tree, an average size now. Perhaps, its going to take a huge size in thirty to forty years time. The complex we live in is not an old one, maximum eight years old, and I don't see more than the same number of growth for the tree. As a winter characteristic, it started loosing leaves even before the calendar predicted dates. It hasn't reached the middle of June, already it had lost almost all of its leaves and had become a bare bones version of it. Its lanky branches have turned thin and are easily shaking with a mere stir in the air like scrawny children in stormy rains. The leaves, green, lean, veined and rounded, have left them steadily. They all had fallen on to the ground and turned yellow-brown giving the undergrowth a saddening look .

So now the tree lives on for another two to three months without receiving the normal service rendered freely by the leaves; cooking food, giving shade and beauty.  I can see it's going on a span of meditation, which I take as a call of nature. But, I wonder, why humans do not pay much heed to these kind of nature's call. I mean they go on working, during winter, summer, during rains and storms.  May be because they have the ability to change their lifestyle to suit with the climatic changes they experience.

However, I believe we should also find time for such meditation and relaxation, so that we get rejuvenated season by season.
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