{"id":23977,"date":"2016-03-10T00:01:02","date_gmt":"2016-03-10T08:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=23977"},"modified":"2016-03-10T00:01:02","modified_gmt":"2016-03-10T08:01:02","slug":"winter-in-the-midwest-when-trees-bare-their-souls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/winter-in-the-midwest-when-trees-bare-their-souls\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter in the Midwest — When Trees Bare Their Souls"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Deciduous<\/a>
Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Note to Readers: This post is the 400th essay I’ve posted on my website since I began blogging seven\u00a0years ago. There’s lots of interesting old stuff to read. You can explore it by clicking on the Don’t Miss images in the column to your\u00a0right, or by diving into the category archives at the top of the page. Have fun!<\/em><\/p>\n

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

My Midwestern gardener friend looks out on her yard and the surrounding woods these days and finds it all a bit depressing. Depressing — her word, not mine. She lives there year-round, so she’s entitled to feel bummed out by skies that darken at 4 p.m.\u00a0and trees stripped of all signs of life.<\/p>\n

Me,\u00a0I swoop in from a 60-degree, greened-up winter in California and thrill at the sight of naked limbs and twigs. There they are, graceful stands of deciduous elm, oak, birch and maple, showing off their true selves.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My trusty point-and-shoot caught some of those trees on a\u00a0gloriously sunny winter afternoon\u00a0last month.\u00a0Too bad\u00a0I can’t ID them. They had no leaves on the day\u00a0I clumped around in the snow\u00a0to snap\u00a0their portraits. And I’m not enough of a naturalist to ID them by their growth habits. (If you can, let me know.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, can trees bare their souls? Do they have souls? Does anybody?<\/p>\n

They — and we — seem so full of heart and will and intention that I want to say, yes, there is such a thing as soul. But my reductionist scientist friends would slap my hands and say, “Get real. Humans are hard-wired to see pattern and cause-and-effect in the things around them; it’s an evolutionary survival thing. A tree is just a tree. A person is just a person.”<\/p>\n

Why then did I succumb to the urge to don a pair of borrowed boots and tromp around in the snow on a below-freezing day, just to\u00a0be\u00a0out there in the middle of\u00a0all that woodsy beauty? Was that a survival thing, too?<\/p>\n

\"Tree<\/a>
Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Tree<\/a>
Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More gardens at “A Midwestern Flower Garden — Beautifully Dead in the Dead of Winter.”<\/a>\u00a0Also, “Look What Happened in My Front Yard Over the Weekend.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

If you haven’t already, now’s a good time to subscribe to my blog. To sign up, just click on the Facebook, Twitter, RSS feed or email box at the top of the right column.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Tree<\/a><\/p>\n

Can trees bare their souls? Do they have souls? Does anybody? <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[34,1638,405,1636,88,31,32,1307,92,1639,94,727],"class_list":["post-23977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-rocky-spiritual-journey","tag-dont-miss","tag-evolution","tag-gardens","tag-midwest","tag-nature","tag-photo-ops","tag-photography","tag-point-and-shoot","tag-science","tag-soul","tag-survival-of-the-fittest","tag-trees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}