As of now, leaves change their color and fall around us. In a fragmented reality, the slow shift of seasons offers a grounding rhythm as nature’s thermostat adjusts with each falling leaf.
It’s obviously difficult to escape the zeitgeist days away from the election. If there’s anything that can contrast the hustle and bustle of the inescapable electoral reality, it is the observation of the eternal return of the seasons.
As the fall advances, those of us having deciduous trees nearby can enjoy the mutation of these earnest, slow-moving beings acting as natural thermostats when next to our home, blocking sunlight in the warm months and now, as it gets darker and cools down, shedding them so we can enjoy the warmth of a lower sun inside. Tree-lined streets, parks, and deciduous forests transform before our eyes, though the change is subtle enough that, asking our kids, I’ve realized that it’s easy not to notice.
The hectic character of the moment doesn’t spawn any contemplation, and hardly many people will think about this in such a week: there’s more afternoon light in parts of the house as trees shed their leaves and let the fall sun in. And it’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
The change of the seasons is something soothing that inspires haiku and long poems, and also movies that we might have watched a long time ago and barely remember, like a South Korean celebration of impermanence, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (Kim Ki-duk, 2003). This movie depicts a very different reality from the frantic flow of information rushing in any direction nowadays: a tiny Buddhist monastery made of wood floats on a lake amid a pristine deciduous forest; it has one monk, and we observe the seasonal change —and the pass of his life before our eyes, as every season represents a stage in life several years apart.
As the title suggests, after the winter freeze and the death of nature, spring returns, and the cycle recommences, guaranteeing the sense of eternal return that gave continuity to traditional societies, and a feeling of primitive empathy for the decay of beings and things.
In modern societies, we have lost track of the ancestral sense of a cyclical return of things, which was related to pre-industrial divisions of labor and a connection with a calendar year organized around agriculture and pastoral management.
A meaningful grounding for our days
In The Scent of Time, philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains how cultures formerly connected to natural rhythms (seasons, day and night, life and death) lost track of a sense of belonging and unity with agrarian calendars and a way of seeing “time” that couldn’t be rushed or mathematically “segmented,” but appreciated.
As societies evolved, time became linear as Christianity expanded. Later on, early modern ideologies demanded a “narrative,” or evolutionary perception of time. Time seemed continuous and was headed toward a meaningful end, and with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, linear time evolved into something ever to measure to guarantee productivity —a resource to control and maximize (or, as Benjamin Franklin put it in Advice to a Young Tradesman, “time is gold”). Historicism thus turned out to be the obsession of an ideological era as capitalism, nationalism, or Marxism, among others, became organized as the new secular religions.
But, after many collective adventures and traumas, postmodernity dissolved the sense that we could explain time, or the world, with perfect systems (whether God, capital, Nation, class struggle, etc.) displaying their verisimilitude within a linear evolution from less to more perfect (sentences like “…a more perfect union…” inspired the new educated classes). The substitute was a messy, subjective time.
Linear time wasn’t humanity’s terminus, or so it seems. According to Byung-Chul Han, time in our era isn’t linear anymore; it has become atomized and chaotic, fragmented, and so erratic that we have lost a consensus regarding its very perception.
In the digital age, traditional boundaries have dissolved, and we have to deal with a constant stream of stimuli fragments and isolated pieces of information; instead of a cohesive flow that carries a general explanation about the world surrounding us, we get the feeling that every moment is presented as potentially significant.
Instead of accommodating to the seasonal changes, agrarian almanacs, our circadian rhythm throughout the day, or meaningful explanations about the world, we have to deal with fragments and work in an endless series of tasks while overwhelmed by distractions. In this context, it becomes harder than in previous eras to find a grounding purpose capable of creating meaning in our days.
By contrast, we can observe the seasonal change of the “natural thermostats” surrounding our homes: as the silent, slow deciduous trees shed their foliage that kept us cooler in summer, the sun reaches deeper into the house, a little bit more every day. The change is barely perceptible, reminding us of our inability to keep track of changes that occur a little bit at a time as days go by. Impermanence never stops and is always willing to show us its beauty if we know where to look; that’s why watching the movie Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring can be revolutionary in our times since it restores our sense of connection with something bigger, making us again beings attached to the eternal return of things.
Making sense of a chaotic zeitgeist
Regarding seasonal change and the idea of impermanence that this 2003 South Korean movie expresses poetically, there are also Western examples of eternal return and the cyclical character of nature, expressed early on by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche about the persistence of spirit when everything seems stalled under the winter snow; it’s then, Nietzsche says, that the sprouts of the new year are developing under the melting ice.
There’s a passage in The Gay Science (Book Four, section 276, titled For the New Year) about how growth and renewal happen subtly and out of our attention, as periods of stillness and dormancy conceal the potentiality of what’s to come —a quiet and invisible growth, similar in the dormant ground and in our inner “winter months”:
“The great liberation comes, it is, however, not the dawn but perhaps the high point of noon; it is certainly a new sun and a new noon. But the rest of it is that things of this kind happen in the winter and under the winter sun — things of the spirit grow under an ice cover, which hides them from all eyes.”
It’s what came to my mind, perhaps due to the videos of monster storms causing floods and destroying forests in Appalachia weeks ago and this week on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. The images coming from Appalachia and now Valencia, Spain, are incredibly dire, with entire hills wiped out in such a way that the devastation seems straight out of the scene of tree destruction of The Lord of the Rings when Saruman’s factories required to wipe out the centenarian surrounding forests.
Perhaps the scenes of monster storms or the acceleration of the constant political campaign we seem to be in continually, one way or another, contrast so much with the meaningful environment I experience every day that it’s easy to understand how some people may get into information rabbit holes, negativity, and cognitive dissonance.
In my case, seeing the storms and polarization and feeling them so close and far at once makes me feel fortunate —to experience the subtle seasonal dance of a deciduous tree—a Japanese maple—facing our attic window, where I’ve placed my desk, of enjoying apparent order and structure instead of the chaos caused by any of the evident accelerations of our time. Of feeling safe and knowing that, no matter the election odds or the recurrent extreme weather events, we’re likely to have a vantage point from where to keep doing what we like, raising our children, etc. Even when big storms and convoluted politics hit close to home, whether in the US or Europe, we could call that a privilege.
A deep relationship with trees: the forest of Fontainebleau
Big storms or fires show us the unpredictability of things, whereas seasonal change near us is a soothing reminder of the things that return and fill us with solace. Both are images of nature, though we fear the former and consider it unpredictable and untamable by man. In contrast, the process of seasonal change, reflected in rural traditions and the poetry of changing forests and landscapes, is soothing and is capable of grounding us, helping us find meaning.
The first time I consciously experienced not only the aesthetic qualities but the micro-climatic importance of a tree outside where I lived (on the street, near a house or a building) was a few years ago when we decided to move from Barcelona to Fontainebleau, a small town one hour south of Paris known for its royal palace and boulder-peppered protected forest.
I was lucky enough to start my days venturing into forest paths, sometimes when it was still pitch dark during the late fall, winter, and early spring days. It’s a rural area of Île-de-France, and mornings can be dark, foggy, and rainy, so sometimes I needed a headlamp and gloves to help me start the early morning run.
We lived near the town’s cemetery, where a path ventured into the forest amid big trees and wooden signs pointed to Barbizon and other picturesque villages revered by painters like Jean-François Millet and Camille Corot, and writers like Robert Louis Stevenson.
I remember listening to audiobooks in French—say, a loose translation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra—while deep in the forest at, say, seven thirty in the morning, and sometimes the vision of the beaming eyes of an animal (a deer, a family of wild boars, a fox, perhaps a badger) made me hyperaware of my surroundings.
I remember feeling some fear once in a while and also paying attention when a path to Barbizon crossed a secondary road; on foggy days, I made sure cars could see me when crossing, and then, the forest quickly grew thick once again.
Sometimes, the area’s microclimate would make me think it’d be a dry day, but then fog and rain would make it really difficult to even keep track of the path. In the fall and wintertime, I twisted my ankles, fell, or ripped my shoes with roots, stones, and branches more than a few times. I also grew a sixth sense and developed a reasonably good orientation inside the thick forest and intricate crosspaths, so I rarely missed the moment to go across town with our then-much-smaller kids to school—they used a bike, and we walked or ran along with them, sometimes helping them a bit on steep streets.
A big maple tree in a French closeted backyard
We rented a big, drafty stone townhouse at Rue St. Merry in an unassuming Francilian style that was almost impossible to keep warm, although we made it work somehow. It had a back “jardin clos,” a garden delimited by a wall in the area’s vernacular. We moved in when the school year had advanced. It was early November, and the spacious living area downstairs—a kitchen on one of the sides, a big dining room in the middle, and a living room with a chimney we were told not to use on the other extreme—had big old-school doors and windows to the back so that we could see a rather wild (more English than French-syle) garden with plenty of trees and bushes at the end.
However, a big deciduous tree was closer to the house several decades old, a field maple that reminded us of the seasonal colors of the Eastern United States. We didn’t know yet, but the owners of the house—an old couple who had decided to buy a much smaller, modern, and convenient place years before when all their children had moved out—had agreed with the neighbors about cutting that tree down. The reason—we would find out much later—was the apparent nuisance to the neighbors, also an older couple, of having to sweep the fallen leaves every fall.
However, there was an official reason that the owners of our new home wanted to proceed with the cut-down: the tree was “too close” to both homes, so there was some risk of toppling in the event of an extraordinary storm. In reality, rows of tall townhomes in all directions and gardens with abundant trees placated strong gusts, even during storms.
The cut tree became essential for us because our children, still small, weren’t that used to living so close to trees. They could see the majestic canopy from their bedroom’s big double window, and in two weeks, leaves went from pale green to brown, red, and yellow. The transformation was happening just on the other side of the window; they could almost touch the tree’s big branches gently waving in the wind, and they played with the fallen leaves after school.
A little while after starting classes at a local bilingual school, they got their winter vacation, so we traveled to Barcelona to wrap things up in our old apartment. When we returned to the rented home in Fontainebleau, as the owners had prevented us, the tree was gone.
A shared sense of absence and mourning
We weren’t expecting it, and a part of our reaction might have been caused by the seasonal sunlight decline, with shorter, colder, rainier days, amplified by us moving—and traveling—a little over six hundred miles north in a straight line. When we opened the door and saw the garden through the window, we immediately sensed something was strikingly off.
Then we realized that the tree at its center, the big tree shedding its leaves to endure winter, was gone, its bare stump as leftover. So we all felt sad and tired, especially our kids, and in seeing how much this mattered to them, Kirsten and I couldn’t help but feel very disappointed as well. We missed the tree for months, and the house, or the garden, never quite recovered their original charm.
We wondered if we would have rented that drafty, empty house in the first place had that majestic deciduous tree been absent when we visited, for its presence made the backyard project its seasonal poetry inside the living room. With the tree gone, light arrived unfiltered inside, making it brighter but also less subtle. In summer, though, the house’s backyard facade was exposed to the sun, as we learned months after.
The owner, in his late seventies, would confess to us later that he had planted that very tree and was as sad as us to see it gone; he was in fact as surprised as us when he entered the living room one day and peeked outside, seeing the bare center of the backyard, now presided by the scar of a big stump. The house had lost an ally capable of making summers cooler and letting the light in during winter, as well as protecting against the elements and contributing to the beauty of the place.
The tree was healthy and separated enough from the house to avoid major risks, so the only advantages of such an intervention that we could come up with were reduced to the neighbors’ convenience: from now on, they would avoid the mass of fallen leaves to fall in their walled backyard. That was our first suburban experience as a family, for, until that moment, we had lived in apartments in the city and Barcelona and shared the surrounding greenery with others.
Bay Area backyards: life amid trees (and squirrels)
In North America, Kirsten has reconnected with the symbiotic relationship that many houses hold with trees in the suburban US. She grew up in places where front yards and backyards had trees that worked as thermostats —and a part of her and her siblings’, playground.
I soon realized that, in California, where there are trees, squirrels hurry up all day back and forth, chasing peers around tree trunks, hiding nuts all over the place, and making territorial noises from different branches.
In Europe, seeing a squirrel feels special; it is so rare outside a few known spots like London, where they are more common (in part due to the presence of the bigger, North American invasive species); here in suburban California, there are so many squirrels, and they are so used to humans, that they go around the roof and look at you as they pass in front of your window, knowing as much about your habits as you know about theirs.
I wonder how many people see the presence of deciduous trees around houses, which is common in the Bay Area, where we live now, contributing to any home’s microclimate. It’s a natural synergy that reduces the need for artificial heating and cooling but also requires maintenance, especially with the prospect of stronger storms capable of toppling big branches and damaging property (or worse).
The patterns that help us
Two books can be especially helpful for those trying to increase the livability of their places by simply planning to grow a few deciduous trees and bushes: Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, and the more technical and less known Landscape Planning for Energy Conservation, by Gary O. Robinette and Charles McClennon. Both books were published in 1977, the year I was born (I hope to endure time as meaningfully as these two works, both practically and philosophically).
Many patterns mentioned by Christopher Alexander can help define a tree-planting strategy. In pattern 104 (site repair), we learn about creating little disturbance with the greenery that’s already there: local species and trees or bushes that have grown in the place are likely to consume little water and be already helping us in keeping the soil’s stability, rain absorption, and also temperature regulation.
Pattern 106 (positive outdoor space) helps design outdoor places with subtle yet effective boundaries: when we appreciate activities outside the house, we’ll learn to appreciate a tree’s canopy, its shade, the fruits it bears, the leaves it sheds (that can be composted and returned to the soil as nutrients), etc.
A Pattern Language also mentions roof gardens (pattern 118), arcades and tree-covered pathways (pattern 119), the balance of areas of light and dark all year round (pattern 135: tapestry of light and dark), or the building of a buffer area around spaces to act as an external, primary layer of insulation against the elements (pattern 166).
As for Landscape Planning for Energy Conservation by John Robinette and Gary McClennon, its many examples and load of data make this book today more relevant than ever:
“Deciduous trees are good temperature control devices, in that they cool in summer and yet allow winter sun to pass through. Vines on walls or trellises are also some of nature’s automatic heat control devices—cooling by evaporation and providing shade.”
Landscape Planning and Energy Conservation (1977), Gary O. Robinette and Charles McClennon, p. 46
“Trees will modify the temperature both inside and outside of your home. Bright and direct sunlight on a summer day may be as strong as 10,000 foot candles of light intensity but research shows a good shade tree will reduce that light intensity to one-tenth that or only about 1,000 candles. Trees also make the yard and garden temperatures much more bearable. Forest research shows there can be as much as 25 degrees [Fahrenheit] difference between shaded area temperature and that recorded in open, unprotected areas on a windless day. Shade will definitely cut down on the cost of air conditioning at home. You might want to look at your yard and home.”
Landscape Planning and Energy Conservation (1977), Gary O. Robinette and Charles McClennon, p. 49
Robinette and McClennon talk extensively and provide evidence regarding strategic tree placement, natural windbreaks for protection and temperature regulation, and the aesthetic value of nicely tended (and meaningful) vegetation in symbiosis with a house, building, neighborhood, or town.
Autumn regeneration: dead leaves make compost
Planting deciduous trees to the south and west of a home can reduce air conditioning reliance significantly by blocking solar gain in the summer. Starting in late fall, these same trees drop their leaves, allowing sunlight to warm walls and windows, adding to the strategy of passive solar heating.
“Deciduous trees near a building create a buffer for microclimatic moderation. They reduce heat loss by acting as a windbreak in colder months, while their foliage slows down wind speed and increases cooling through evapotranspiration in summer.”
But trees are not only energy savers or “landscape design elements,” they are sublime beings that provide wildlife habitats and cleaner air. And, perhaps above all, they make us dream and think about the long cycles of nature, inviting us and our erratic perceptions to be a part of it.
Since our children’s school days in France, back when we lost that tree in the Fontainebleau backyard, we discovered a poem as a family that Jacques Prévert composed in 1945, a year of big significance when “hope” and “meaning” seemed to lack their former status as words, once the world realized the atrocities of the war and its nuclear ending.
But trees kept growing, and people kept observing them through the window, or sitting under them.
Yves Montand turned it into a song that my grandmother loved when she listened to it on the radio across the Pyrenees.
(…)
The dead leaves are picked up by the shovelful
You see, I have not forgotten…
The dead leaves are picked up by the shovelful
So are memories and regretsAnd the north wind carries them away
Into the cold night of oblivion
You see, I have forgotten
The song you used to sing to me(…)
From Les feuilles mortes, Jacques Prévert, 1945