Last night’s wind fell the last of the apricot leaves.  Their fall ends a remarkable season.  From spring birth to grounded resting they served us simple beauty, remarkable shade on a hundred-degree summer day, and protected their natural treed sibling: the apricot.

Each year, fall apricot leaves teach me a little more about redemption.  As the weather cools and days shorten I wait for the leaves to begin changing color.  Then comes a day, when the sun reflects just right and their green isn’t quite yesterday’s green.  There is always a bit of sadness when that day arrives.  Yet I am willing to experience that sadness, for alongside, I feel a a settling grace in the air for what is beginning.

This is the season when you cannot miss the leaf’s indigeneity.  A seasonal kindness experienced between the birthing tree and dying leaf.  A reciprocity that in Christian terms is the mutuality of birth, death, and resurrection.  From my Christian construct, the yellowing apricot leaf becomes Christ.

Yellowing happens in this season because the leaf allows its chlorophyll to break down into its base nutrients.  As the chlorophyll breaks down, the leaf’s dominant green pigment is lost, which in-turn allows for the unmasking of the leaf’s other pigments.  Those pigments, now dominate, become the leaf’s color.  Some trees become red, others orange, and for the apricot, yellow.  During this change, the leaf funnels their nutrients to the tree; who holds them throughout the winter; and with spring’s arrival, uses them to birth next year’s leaves.  Once those nutrients reenter the tree, the leaf creates a protective seal between their stem and branch.  When the seal is completed, the leaf separates and falls.

Birth, life, death, and resurrection are common throughout creation.  The grace of giving life so another might live is normal and everyday.  The Christ of indigeneity is neither (only) human nor a one-off.  Rather, just as the leaf gives of itself so life may be rebirthed, so does all of creation.  Creational indigeneity cannot be bought or sold; there is no prestige gained in the common; nor power attained in life’s sacrifice. Rather the landscape hold loveliness on a covenantal table of lives given: the picked grape, the harvested wheat, the yellowed leaf.  Life resurrected and redeemed: vine, soil, tree.

(First published: Center for Indigenous Ministries: November Newsletter)