My Seasonal Self

From my bedroom window, I look directly into the branches of a dormant but very much alive silver maple. In the fall, compact red buds formed, tracing the tree’s twigs, and now these buds are slowly expanding in anticipation of spring. Never mind that they are encased in a half inch of ice right now. In just over a month’s time, they will burst open, exploding into thousands of pale green leaves. There is so much life contained in a single tree, even when it is stripped naked and sleeping.

In some ways, long Covid has landed me in a season of dormancy, too. My growth is not obvious from the outside. I’ve shed a thousand leaves—a thousand bits of myself—since getting sick. Identities, habits, hopes, relationships, plans, abilities, certainty and security—it’s all fluttered down, like so much leaf litter. I’m grieving, but I am budding, too.

It’s still too early to know exactly what my buds contain. Will the new leaves be fresh versions of the old ones? Will I run and rock climb again? Take my kids camping? Be well enough to work? Or will these leaves be fundamentally different, the outgrowth of necessary adaptation to a changed environment?    

I don’t know. And I confess, I haven’t let go of the old leaves quite as cleanly as my silver maple has. Maybe I’m more of a beech. Beech trees are marcescent, holding onto the last season’s dried and papery leaves well into the winter and sometimes all the way through to spring. There are bits of myself that I’m not ready to let go of. They don’t actively nourish me like they used to, but the memory of them comforts me, like the rainstick percussion of beech leaves shivering in a winter wind.

I guess I’m okay with this. I don’t fault myself for shedding leaves, and I don’t fault myself for holding on. Dormancy and transition are both part of my growth. Trees grow their thickest rings in the fair-weather years, but I don’t think people work that way. If you could lop off the top half of my soul to see into her rings, you might find that this past year’s ring is the thickest of them all.

I hope you can see growth—or the possibility of it—in yourself, too. I hope that you can give yourself permission to let go of old leaves, as well as permission to hold on. There is more than one way to be a tree in winter and more than one way to be a human with long Covid. Maybe self-acceptance and self-compassion are the warm light that nourish new growth. Maybe it matters less whether we are stark naked or decked out in old leaves and matters more how we relate to our sprouting and seasonal selves.

How do the metaphors of dormancy and budding sit with you? How has illness impacted the way you relate to yourself?

P.S. I’ve decided to drop the membership model I’ve used for the past four or five months. I want this newsletter to be available to absolutely anyone who wants it. That means all subscribers will be getting an email from me just about every week. It also means that you can access Corona Cafe’s full archives on Substack, including my collection of yoga videos for long-haulers. I hope you enjoy! And if you do, you can show the love with a ‘like’, a comment, a share, or even by buying me a coffee.