What the trees already know

Art © TrueCreatives via Canva.com

There is something about autumn that feels like an exhale. The air changes, the days grow shorter, and the noise of summer begins to soften. Slowly, almost effortlessly, the trees begin to let go.

They do not fight to keep every leaf. They release what they can no longer carry into the season ahead, draw their energy inward, and return to their roots. Nature reminds us every year that change, release, rest, and even death are not separate from life. They are part of it.

I have been thinking about that a lot lately because this year, I have been living through my own season of falling away.

Some of what I have released, I chose. Relationships changed. Identities shifted. In February, I left the security of my full-time job to step fully into the spiritual and healing work I knew I was being called to do.

Then, on May 15, my dad died suddenly and unexpectedly.

Sometimes we willingly release the leaf. Sometimes we know something has completed its season, even while part of us desperately wants to hold on. And sometimes life rips something from our hands that we never would have chosen to release.

I was there when my dad went into cardiac arrest. I called 911 and watched as EMTs worked for roughly forty minutes trying to bring him back. There are experiences that divide your life into a before and an after. This was one of them.

I am a Psychic Medium. I have spent years connecting people with their loved ones in Spirit and helping them understand that physical death does not mean the end of our connection. But in that moment, I was not experiencing his death as a medium.

I was his daughter.

Grief does not care what you know. It does not care how spiritual you are, how many tools you have, or how deeply you believe in life after death. Knowing that consciousness continues does not mean you stop missing the physical person.

I can believe with every part of me that my dad is still here and still wish I could hear his physical voice. I can communicate with him and still wish I could hug him. I can know that he did not simply cease to exist and still grieve the life I thought we had more time to live together.

We do not have to choose between grieving someone and continuing our relationship with them. Both can be true.

Since my dad died, I have experienced moments that have only deepened what I already believed about life after death. One of those moments involved a record player turning itself on when no one had touched it. Experiences like that are not always dramatic. Often, they are subtle, personal, and specific enough that something inside of you recognizes the person you love before your analytical mind has time to explain it away.

But connection is not only found in signs from Spirit. Sometimes it lives in the ordinary things someone left behind.

I have a distressed antique dresser that makes me think of my dad every time I look at it. I bought it specifically because I loved its worn, imperfect character. My dad, trying to be helpful, decided it needed a little touching up.

So he painted part of it.

The wrong color.

At the time, I laughed and shook my head. It was one of the last projects he worked on before he died, and now that mismatched paint is something I would not change for anything.

Grief has a way of making ordinary things sacred. A dresser is no longer just a dresser. A song is no longer just a song. Their handwriting, their favorite chair, something they fixed—or tried to fix—their jokes, quirks, and even the things that once drove you crazy become reminders that this person was here.

We stay connected to the people we love not only through signs from Spirit, but through the fingerprints they left all over our lives.

Autumn teaches us about release, but I think we sometimes romanticize letting go. We hear phrases like “release what no longer serves you” so often that we can make it sound easy. Light the candle. Write the thing down. Burn it. Move on.

But sometimes letting go hurts like hell.

Sometimes you know something needs to end and still do not want it to. Sometimes you grieve people who have died, and sometimes you grieve people who are still alive. We grieve relationships, dreams, careers, identities, and futures we thought we were going to have.

Not everything we release was wrong.

A tree does not release its leaves because the leaves were bad. The season simply changed.

Not every relationship that ends was a mistake. Not every version of ourselves we outgrow needs to be judged. And not everything we lose needs to be wrapped in a neat spiritual explanation about why it had to happen.

Sometimes we simply do not know why.

Sometimes our work is not to understand everything that happened. Sometimes our work is to allow ourselves to be changed by it.

Look at what a tree does when autumn arrives. Its energy begins moving inward, toward its roots. It does not immediately try to grow new leaves. It honors the season it is actually in.

Maybe we could learn something from that.

We live in a world that is constantly pushing us forward. Do more. Fix it. Get over it. Move on. Stay positive. But there are seasons when moving forward is not what we need. Sometimes we need to go deeper.

Grief has taught me that healing is not one-dimensional because grief is not one-dimensional. It touches the body, the mind, the heart, our energy and our spirit. It can show up as exhaustion, looping thoughts, anger, sadness, numbness, or a deep longing to know: Where did they go? Are they okay? Are they still with me?

This has deepened the way I understand the work I do. I do not believe we can mindset our way through everything, and I do not believe we should spiritually bypass pain by trying to find a positive meaning for every terrible thing that happens.

Sometimes healing means tending to the body and nervous system. Sometimes it means looking at subconscious beliefs and patterns. Sometimes it involves energy work.

Sometimes it means sitting with grief rather than trying to fix it. And sometimes healing includes discovering that a relationship we thought we had lost is still available to us in a different form.

Losing my dad did not change what I believed about life after death. It changed why I care so deeply about helping others experience that connection for themselves. It also gave me a deeper understanding of what it means to sit on the other side of the table.

For years, I have watched people recognize their loved ones through the evidence and messages that come through in a mediumship reading. I have watched tears turn into laughter when a personality, memory, or ridiculous little detail comes forward that means nothing to me but everything to them.

I understood why those moments mattered.

We stay connected to the people we love not only through signs from Spirit, but through the fingerprints they left all over our lives.

Now I understand them as a daughter who wants one more conversation, one more sign, one more moment of, Dad, are you there?

My father’s death did not give me my gift, but it has given me an even deeper understanding of why that gift matters so damn much.

It has also strengthened my desire to help people understand that connection with Spirit is not reserved for psychic mediums. Our loved ones may already be communicating with us in ways we do not recognize because we have been taught to dismiss the subtle, question our intuition, or explain away what we cannot logically understand.

Maybe the question is not always, “Why haven’t they given me a sign?”

Maybe sometimes we need to ask, “Have I become quiet enough to notice how they might already be speaking?”

Perhaps that is another gift autumn offers us. As the outside world begins to quiet, we are invited to quiet ourselves, too. To slow down. Turn inward. Listen differently. Notice what becomes audible when we stop filling every empty space with noise.

So this fall, maybe instead of asking what you should be doing next, ask yourself something different.

What season am I actually in?

What am I still trying to hold together?

What needs my attention beneath the surface?

And what if I stopped demanding that I bloom when my soul is asking me to go inward?

We are not meant to be in spring all the time. There are seasons for becoming and seasons for grieving. Seasons for releasing and seasons for resting. There are seasons when the most important growth happening within us cannot be seen because it is happening underground, at the roots.

I still miss my dad. I am still grieving him. And I am still connected to him.

Those truths do not cancel each other out. They exist together.

Maybe that is what the trees already know: Letting go does not always mean losing the connection. Sometimes it means learning a new way to hold it, a new way to listen, and a new way to love.

This autumn, perhaps the trees are inviting us to do what they have always done. Slow down. Turn inward. Tend to our roots. Honor what was. Grieve what is gone. Notice what remains.

And trust that love, like nature, has a remarkable way of changing form without ever truly disappearing.

With Love, Heather LaFond