I’m someone who needs help getting through winter. Despite my longing to hibernate until it’s over, daily walks are proving to be the remedy. It takes several minutes to don my layers and wrestle my feet into boots – more effort than you’d think worth it for a slow pace over the road and back, but this short pilgrimage matters. What I’m seeking is something I know I will miss when spring finally comes: the sight of sky through bare tree branches. There are two trees near my house, the old lime and a cracked white birch. I walk to one, then the other, then home again, just to gaze up through the dark sprawl of empty twigs.
Science tells me I’m not imagining things. Looking at a fractal pattern has been shown to reduce stress levels in humans by up to 60%, and that’s what a tree is: a pattern that repeats itself so that each small part ends up looking similar to the whole. This pattern is less obvious in summer, but beautifully stark in winter.
With a tree scrawled like a child’s drawing in heavy contrast against the sky, I get to really see how the trunk divides itself into branches, dividing again and again all the way to its tips. Who wouldn’t be delighted by that? Every storm-broken twig on the pavement mirrors the tree it fell from, each its own tree in miniature.
I let myself be soothed by it as each day passes, but the ache of emotion that comes today as I look up suggests the sight can pull at deeper, more important feelings still. Perhaps it’s the striking similarity to my own fractal respiratory structure, the reminder that in budding soon, each tree will resume its work of being a kind of lung too, as essential to me as my own. Perhaps it’s simply the vulnerability of something stopped still and laid bare, all the stories that lie hidden behind the self-contained busyness of summer now revealed, truthful and undeniable: the tree’s broken limbs, abandoned nests still sheltered in its arms.
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