I spend a lot of time in a comfy blue recliner looking at this tree. It’s called an American Sycamore, and you can’t tell from the picture, but it’s about 200 feet tall (This is just the top portion). I never really noticed it behind my home until this year. Now, I wake up to it every morning, and it is the focus of my attention many times throughout each day.

I have never had much interest in trees without their leaves on. I have always considered the long winter months without leaves a bit of a blight on an otherwise beautiful world. I was wrong, of course. Now that all I can see is the white bark, I can see what a wonder the tree is, even bereft of all the leaves! It is so balanced, well-formed and healthy. That’s what makes the tree so strong and valuable, and the leaves so abundant!

This is a metaphor, and as such, you can figure out what it means to you. Here’s what I have been thinking.

For most of my life, I gauged, perhaps not my worth, but certainly my usefulness, on how strong and capable I was, how much I was able to accomplish, the things I was learning, the service I was rendering, even the number of things I could cross of my list in a day (I used to add things to my list, like “make the bed”, just so I could cross them off my list). Life is what we make it, and most of mine has been a flurry of activity.

These actions and activities were my leaves.

For several years now, with each new physical challenge, I have been able to accomplish less than the year before. One by one, the leaves have fallen from this tree (I’m more of a shrub than a sycamore, but, for the metaphor’s sake, and my ego, let’s just say I’m a mighty sycamore).  It feels a lot like winter right now, and all that’s left is the bare branches and trunk.

Sometimes we think it’s a tragedy when life, or a life, gets stripped of all the outer signs of its worth and strength; all the things that we thought made it beautiful. We’d be wrong. Most people will, at some point, have to see themselves and their life in the winter, without a single outward quality left to admire.

There’s so much beauty in what’s left. Just the bare, exposed wood, reaching heavenward.