Nature Journal #1: We Change Like Leaves

How Changing Leaves Can Remind Us of the Trans Experience

I’ve started nature journaling as a hobby. I wanted to share it with you, see how you like it:

These trees make me feel like I can breathe.

I find a seat made up of logs, cut out and shaped flat for sitting. When I sit on the surface, hard and unforgiving, I notice to my left a grove of shimmering trees. The sun casts an ethereal glow onto leaves yet to fall. For days now it has not rained. The sky is blue as summer and the air as warm as May. Remove yourself from the shade of trees—what is left of them—and the heat feels close to summer.

Climate change is here. Has been for a long time.

I turn my attention back to the trees. An array of light greens, deep yellow, canary yellow, the coming on of rust, light orange on its way to red. Bright, warm and cool. The way the sun hits them reminds me of a warm smile.

The leaves are still and every few seconds another one drifts down to earth.

Coming home.

When a breeze approaches, do the trees welcome it? Do the trees prefer stillness, or do they not mind being tossed about? It’s a certain transformation, the way trees lose their leaves, let them go and allow them to fall, vulnerable to the rushing winds and harsh winters of life. The way they allow themselves to be naked, exposed to elements and drastic, harsh temperatures, stark, quiet stillness of winter where around them everything has gone under or died off. The coming of spring and the newness of starting again. Of blooming new leaves that look the same but aren’t. Of color and sun and the dawn of being born again.

I can’t help but be reminded of the trans experience: from female to male, male to female, and those in-between spaces of a non-binary world where perhaps each day is a unique kind of starting over. A trying on of different leaves from one moment to the next, and flowing always with the breeze we call life, being swayed by it but never broken.