Grieving Dead Leaves and Finding New Life
Wet earth, after the rain, it’s one of my favorite scents in the world. I stepped outside into my driveway this morning to inhale the intoxicating smell of fertile soil, of new growth, of potential.
When I was a kid, I used to say that spring was my least favorite season. The trees were still bare-branched, the earth was muddy and cold, the streets caked with gravel and salt, the clean, white snow was now patchy, crunchy and dirty, exposing everything that had died with the first frost six months prior. I wanted to fast-forward to summer, where the sun is warm on my skin, the trees are lush with green foliage and the days are long.
But over the years, as I’ve traveled through the peaks and valleys of my holistic healing journey, I’ve uncovered my soul-connection to nature and her seasons. I’ve begun to appreciate the change of season and the wisdom each one has to offer us.
Holistic healing isn’t just about using natural, non-toxic medicines to relieve ailments (although, that is a great perk to using natural medicine). What I found throughout my nearly 10 years of healing with homeopathy is that I began to make connections between parts of myself that I’d once believed were separate from one another. First, were these little nuances that allowed me to see the connection between my mental stress-levels and the way my body felt in certain situations. Then I started to learn how I was processing, or not processing, grief or loss, or stress or the things in my life I couldn’t control. The awareness of these things helped me make changes that I couldn’t make before. As I studied homeopathy more deeply, I began to make connections between my own being and the world outside of me. I began to see the seasons mirrored in my life events. I started to wonder about the life behind things in nature, like a tree, or a bird, or a stone. I then began to see myself in these things. How I could lose branches like a tree and continue to grow. How, like a bird, I often felt like I needed to get above a situation to understand it, or how when I couldn’t make a decision, I could feel stuck like a stone in the ground.
I recently experienced a loss. It was sudden, unexpected, and it shook my world up in ways I never saw coming. It brought up an extreme stress-response, and I spent a couple weeks in fight or flight. This blindsiding event, forced me to be present, because I had no idea what was going to come next. I remember having a conversation with my partner and saying, “All I have in this moment is how I feel.” I was sort of stuck in a liminal space of not knowing how to respond to the situation. I didn’t have an answer, but knew a chapter in my life was definitely coming to a close.
Though I felt devastated and upset and my emotions were at an all time high, I eventually began to realize, this whole thing kind of came at the perfect time of year. Spring. The season where I find myself standing here, ankle deep, in the muck. Brown, decaying leaves on the ground, a reminder of what I’d lost. Something once so lush and full of potential, now lifeless. But, if there is anything I’ve learned from Homeopathy it’s to give myself permission to feel everything I need to feel in the present moment. So I grieved the dead leaves.
But therein lies the silver lining, because the beautiful thing about the muck and the dead leaves is that they create the perfect environment for new life. So just like that, I started to see new buds peeking out of the spaces where the dead leaves dropped, soft and green and full of potential. As I took a great, deep breath through my nose I felt my lungs inspire with the essence of fertile soil. Vitality. I am filled with new life, and even greater inspiration than before.
So even though life doesn’t always get to be green and lush and sunny and warm and sometimes it’s muddy and cold, and we’re reminded of the things that couldn’t be forever, nature is here to remind us that nothing is permanent, and though there can be grief in that, there is always hope in death because we know that soon we’ll see new life.
So if you find yourself stuck ankle deep in the muck, remember to give yourself space to grieve the dead leaves, then take a step outside, breathe a great, deep breath and let the essence of spring inspire you with brand new potential.
Be loved,
Katie