Deciduous: The Quiet Intelligence of Becoming

A few weeks ago, I woke up with a word rolling around in my consciousness. Deciduous. Of all the things to wake up thinking about! I hadn’t been reading about trees or studying the changing seasons. The word was simply there, lingering somewhere between sleep and waking, asking for my attention. I carried it with me throughout the day, turning it over in my mind, wondering why this particular word had found its way into my awareness.

That evening, my husband was watching a television show, and I happened to overhear an actor say, “I don’t believe in stasis. Only evolution.” Well, now. That got my attention. Deciduous. Stasis. Evolution. Suddenly, the three words came together, and I knew exactly where this was going. The next morning was our weekly Imaginal Souls gathering, where we explore the intimate relationship between personal transformation and our participation in the larger evolution of consciousness. I’d been wondering what wanted to emerge for our time together, and here it was, arriving through a word that had awakened me and a sentence I’d overheard. I had to smile at the way life sometimes gets my attention.

The more I contemplated those words, the more intrigued I became by the extraordinary intelligence of our changing seasons and how easily we mistake stillness for inactivity. We tend to imagine evolution as something dramatic, a breakthrough, an awakening, a great leap into a new way of being. We look for the unmistakable moment when everything changes, preferably accompanied by a little thunder, lightning, and perhaps a standing ovation. Yet so much of life’s becoming happens quietly, through countless subtle movements we may never notice.

Here in the Heartland, autumn has been painting the landscape in glorious shades of amber, gold, and crimson. I’ve always loved this season, but I found myself looking at it with fresh eyes. As daylight shortens and temperatures change, a deciduous tree begins preparing for winter long before its branches are bare. Valuable nutrients are drawn back from the leaves into the tree’s living tissues, where they can be conserved for another season. Chlorophyll breaks down, revealing the beautiful yellows and oranges that have been hidden beneath the green. Eventually, a specialized layer forms where each leaf joins its branch, allowing the leaf to be released.

I find that distinction exquisite. What looks like an ending is part of an intricate living process already underway. The tree gathers what it needs, releases what has completed its season, and enters a quieter rhythm of life. The fallen leaves become shelter and nourishment for the living soil, while the tree conserves energy and carries the promise of another spring within its branches. There is so much happening in what appears to be stillness.

And I began wondering how often we overlook the quiet ways we are changing because we’re waiting for something extraordinary to happen. We may find ourselves perceiving harmonic patterns and relationships that were once invisible to us, recognizing an emerging possibility long before we can explain its shape. Our capacity to remain present within complexity expands, and we discover a growing trust in the intelligence of an unfolding process. We begin listening for what wants to emerge through a conversation or a community, sensing when to contribute our own insight and when to make room for the wisdom of others.

Even our understanding of leadership begins to evolve as we discover how our presence contributes to the coherence of a larger relational field, creating conditions for possibilities beyond what any one of us could imagine or achieve alone. These changes may be so gradual that we scarcely notice them, until one day we find ourselves participating in life with a depth of awareness, discernment, and relational capacity that would once have been beyond our reach.

With this contemplation taking shape, we opened with an experiential transmission for our gathering the following morning. I wanted us to enter the rhythms of the deciduous tree and sense the quiet intelligence of life moving within us. We explored what it might feel like to recognize ourselves as participants in the very evolution we seek, already alive within the season unfolding around us.

And then, as we opened the conversation, something remarkable happened. The first person to share had recently been in another gathering where they were contemplating how fallen leaves nourish and regenerate the soil. Another had been reading an email about the intelligence of deciduous trees, particularly the way they reclaim nutrients from their leaves before releasing them. Someone else had turned on music and found themselves looking at a magnificent image of a tree viewed from below, with a magical abundance appearing to pour down through its branches. The sharing continued, and the first five people who spoke revealed that they had been immersed in remarkably similar themes, images, or experiences before arriving at our gathering.

I sat there listening, astonished and delighted. These weren’t simply ideas that had arisen in response to the transmission we’d just shared. Several people had been carrying these contemplations for at least a day. While I was waking with the word deciduous and pondering an overheard sentence about evolution, others were having their own encounters with the same seasonal wisdom. We had arrived through different experiences, yet somehow found ourselves meeting in a remarkably similar place. The resonance was palpable, and the conversation unfolded with a natural coherence that none of us could have orchestrated.

After nearly four decades of working with individuals and groups, I continue to be fascinated by what becomes possible when people gather with openness, curiosity, and genuine presence. I’ve witnessed the extraordinary intelligence that emerges through our relationships, and I’ve also come to recognize something more mysterious at work. We are participating in a living relational field that extends beyond the boundaries of any gathering, an organizing intelligence already moving through our lives before we arrive together. Our experiences, intuitions, encounters, and seemingly unrelated contemplations may be participating in a larger unfolding that we can only partially perceive. When we attune to love as the reference tone of that living field, something remarkable becomes possible.

We begin to recognize patterns and connections that none of us could have anticipated, and the intelligence emerging through our shared presence becomes something far greater than the sum of our individual contributions. That morning, as one person’s experience illuminated another’s and the conversation found its own rhythm, I had the unmistakable sense that we were entering a process already underway. We had gathered to explore the quiet intelligence of becoming, and the gathering itself became a beautiful expression of the very thing we were contemplating.

The field was already alive. The gathering gave it another way to express itself.

I’ve been thinking about that experience ever since. There is something deeply moving about discovering that an inquiry stirring within us may also be alive in the awareness of others. We each have our own histories, perceptions, and ways of making meaning, yet our lives continually intersect through relationships and experiences we cannot fully anticipate. I don’t need to explain precisely how those similar contemplations arose to appreciate the wonder of what happened. We were all living within the same autumn season, certainly, and human beings are wonderfully attentive to patterns and connections. Still, the experience invited us to notice something larger about the nature of relationship itself.

A tree is continually responding to sunlight, temperature, water, soil, and the countless organisms with which it shares an ecosystem. Its life unfolds through relationship. So does ours. We are shaped by conversations, encounters, and experiences that may continue working within us long after we’ve stopped consciously thinking about them. We also shape the conditions of one another’s becoming through the quality of our attention, the generosity of our listening, and the possibilities we are willing to explore together. This is part of the living inquiry at the heart of my book, A World of Love, and the community we’ve created through Imaginal Souls. I have come to understand love as the organizing intelligence of life, and I am endlessly curious about what becomes possible as we grow more conscious of our belonging within this relational universe.

That morning, something beautiful took shape among us. Each person arrived carrying a different experience, a different perspective, a particular expression of the same unfolding inquiry. As we listened and shared, those individual threads became part of a larger tapestry, revealing connections that none of us had anticipated. It reminded me that coherence can be experienced in the simplest of ways, through the quality of our presence and the relationships that allow something new to emerge.

And so I keep returning to the image of the autumn tree. Its leaves have gathered sunlight through an entire season. What can be conserved is drawn inward. What has completed its work is released. And what returns to the Earth becomes part of the nourishment for life yet to come. All of this is happening within a larger ecology of relationships, in response to the changing conditions of the world.

There is such wisdom in recognizing that life has many rhythms. Some seasons invite us to grow and express ourselves abundantly. Others call us to conserve, integrate, release, or rest. Yet I wonder if the deeper invitation of this experience is to recognize that our becoming is never entirely our own. We are participating in a living universe whose intelligence is expressed through relationships, often in ways we cannot anticipate or fully understand. As with our Imaginal Souls session, each of us arrived with our own experiences and perspectives, unaware that something larger was already taking shape among us. As we shared, the threads began to weave themselves into a pattern none of us could have orchestrated. When we came together, something became visible that none of us could have seen alone.

This affirms how I think about leadership, creativity, and conscious evolution. We may be far more deeply involved in the emergence of our shared future than we realize, even before we know what is taking shape. Our invitation is to cultivate the perceptual and relational capacities to recognize what is already moving, discern how we are being called to participate, and contribute our unique gifts to its unfolding.

The tree is not waiting for spring to be alive. Neither are we. Life is always life-ing. Love is always loving. And we are already participating in the quiet miracle of what comes next.

What might change in the way you live and lead if you began trusting that the intelligence needed for what comes next is already moving through the relationships of which you are a part?