[Seasons: Winter IX]
From my window I can see four fruit trees and a nut tree. Twiggy and bare, they look dead. Unlike the Douglass Fir behind them—erect, green, and still vibrant—the fruit trees are lifeless.
I know better, which is why winter is the season for pruning. The fruit trees aren’t dead, their vitality has merely retreated. In the warmer months, sap, like blood in the human body, flows freely to the furthest reaches of the tree’s appendages. The opposite is true in the winter: the sap, along with the tree’s nutrients, hibernate in the lowest portion of the trunk and in the roots. The structure of the tree can be manipulated by removing whole branches, but its future health is not threatened.
Winter often looks and feels like death. Perhaps your vitality has retreated underground for a time. And like a tree, it’s holding in a dark place, waiting to burst forth in the spring.
