A reflection from today’s learning through nature
As we step into autumn, we’ve been moving from space to earth — grounding our learning in the changing season.
As part of our Autumn Seeds and Planting project, the children were invited to imagine themselves as deciduous trees, noticing what might be ready to fall away.
They explored the idea of release — the feelings, habits, memories, or connections that no longer served them and could now return to the earth.
Some wrote poems or songs.
Others made leaf rubbings, writing their words of release onto each one.
Then came the letting go — leaves dropped from branches, or gently scrunched and placed down, each movement an act of choice.
Before that, they explored colour.
Each child chose a shade that matched how they felt about letting go.
For some, the colours were bright and joyful — the excitement of opening space.
For others, they were deeper or softer — the tenderness and uncertainty of release.
Every colour belonged.
And perhaps, in moments like this, we can notice our own patterns too — the places where we hold tightly to process, shape, and vision, and the quiet wish to let things grow freely beyond our reach.
Nature reminds us that these are not opposites.
Before a deciduous tree lets go of its leaves, it draws back what still nourishes it — the chlorophyll, the energy, the water that will sustain it through winter. It holds what serves and releases what’s ready.
Maybe we can, too.
Maybe there is space to hold both — the steadiness of care and the courage to release.
To notice the wish to control and the desire to let go, and to see how they might coexist, even feed one another.
To find a rhythm that allows both the tending and the trusting.
Both
We do not need to choose.
We can be the branch that holds
and the breeze that releases.
We can gather what still feeds us
and let fall what is finished.
Even endings make the soil richer.
Even letting go is a way of tending.
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