Postcard 💌 from Colorado

Hi again. Thank you for coming back to my Substack. Today I’m writing about my recent trip to Colorado and my love affair with the golden Aspen trees.

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I’m writing to you from Colorado this week, more specifically a sunny patio in the Rocky Mountains. I can feel the sun on my eyelids, recharging me. The warmth of the sun is a deep contrast to the icy breeze that has been blowing throughout the valley.

The drop in temperature and this elevation has caused the fall foliage to begin, and I am one of many “leaf peepers” here in the Rockies to witness the Earth change into various shades of liquid gold.

It’s quite a show really.

Over the last month I’ve been writing a lot of articles surrounding this exact topic, Fall Colors at Mt. Rainier, Fall Bucket List, and 9 Fall Photo Spots in Portland. We all know that life is anything but permanent, and the fall leaves changing is a testimony to that.

Me and my husband typically do a trip with a focus on fall colors every year. For me it begins with research and planning. We dial in on where to stay, how to avoid crowds (hint, go on weekdays), a window of dates when the leaves should change, highway routes, drive times, and a sprinkle of restaurant recommendations. 

The magic happens outside of that. Once we’re there, the logistics are locked in, then the lessons and takeaways from traveling begin to unfold. This is where the planning stops and “relinquishing control” becomes real.

I’m the type of person that likes to have everything mapped out, and to anticipate what will happen. Travel seems to do the opposite of that, every time. My challenge to myself is to put my hands up (figuratively) and let things flow. The tighter I hold onto things, the harder it is to let them go.

And with traveling, you gotta let it go. Daily.

I missed last week on Substack because I didn’t know what to write. I felt like such a failure. “You do this full time you know, think of something!” echoed in my head. I fought the icky feeling of writers block (hello perfectionism!), took a steadying breath and decided to hold off and let the writing come to me.

After all, we had 4 more days on this trip, and I knew a lesson was inevitable, why force it? In a world where content and creation is constantly churning ahead, moving faster and faster, it’s good for me to use discernment when I need more time vs. cranking something out to feed an algorithm.

Back to Colorado and the fall colors. The main type of tree that changes color in the fall are Aspens. Which admittedly I knew nothing about before last week. They even have a bougie ski town named after them, and I see why. These trees are EVERYWHERE in Colorado, staking a claim on the mountainsides just as much as the evergreens. 

On day three we were set to drive through Kebler Pass into the town of Crested Butte. This stretch is supposedly one of the best for leaf peeping. Being the passenger princess that I am, I took my eyes off the GPS to instead look up information about where we were going. Immediately my eyes zeroed in at this info:

“One aspen tree is actually only a small part of a larger organism. A stand or group of aspen trees is considered a singular organism with the main life force underground in the extensive root system. In a single stand, each tree is a genetic replicate of the other, hence the name a “clone” of aspens used to describe a stand.”

My mind immediately went to a cluster of mushrooms and how they too, operate as a single organism. 

The Aspen groves are commanding, glittering, shimmering in gold. Their brilliance is seen from across valleys, high on mountain tops. They are glorious, glimmering giants. They are at their best, their brightest. Humans flock from all over the world to come here and witness them. 

& in three weeks, the leaves will be gone. Over. They burn so bright just to become spindly stick branches stretching against the sky in less than a month.

Is that so bad? Subconsciously I think “yeah”.

I want to be a glittering gold Aspen tree at its peak. I want to be easy to love, pleasing to myself and others, ALL THE TIME. I am afraid of being stripped bare. I don’t want it to be stick season.

That is not reality, nor is it natural.  You cannot exist in a way where you highlight the good parts of yourself while rejecting the bad. They are both part of you, and the complex experience of being human.

For myself it is normalizing the ebbs and flows of the natural world – that we are intrinsically that too. I’m imagining each year of our lives as a yearly cycle in nature. We all will get our time to shine, and feel like we're at our prime.

Then that will end, we will go dormant. We might even have to look at parts of ourselves that we consider boring, ugly, drab and hard to love. This is the cycle that repeats but we’re a new version each time.

We don't have to be glimmering gold every day of the year. If we were, it wouldn't be as special when it’s our time to shine.

xx Em