The leaf has not fallen. Not yet.

It is caught on a tangled vine, its edges curled and dry, its veins dark and exposed. A cap of snow rests on it. Everything around it has let go, but this one remains—waiting.

You won’t see this from the window of a warm house.

You have to pull on boots. Zip your coat. Step into the cold where winter shows itself honestly. Out here, there is no reassurance—and yet there is beauty, a beauty that wounds and opens the heart. Nature in winter carries an ache, a sense of incompleteness. Life is not gone, but it is not yet restored.

That ache is what St. Paul names when he writes:

“For creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.”
(Romans 8:19)

Creation waits.

Not as a backdrop for humankind, but as a fellow sufferer. Paul tells us that the earth has been “subjected to futility,” not by its own choice, and that it groans as in childbirth. Fields stripped bare. Forests thinned. Creatures pressed into hiding. Winter makes this visible. The world feels paused, as if something essential has not yet arrived.

The leaf caught on the vine feels like that pause made visible.

Waiting, in Scripture, is never empty. It leans toward fulfillment.

That is the heart of The Man Who Planted Trees, Jean Giono’s brief and luminous story. A barren, wind-scoured land appears beyond hope—villages abandoned, springs dry, soil blown away. The desolation is palpable. And still, the land waits. It endures until one man chooses to begin planting trees.

A solitary shepherd returns to the land after a bitter war. The hills are bare, the soil thin and exhausted, the villages emptied. He lives alone in a small hut and carries almost nothing with him. From a surviving oak, he gathers the strongest acorns, testing them carefully in his hands. Then, walking the ridges day after day, he uses his staff to press a small hole into the hard ground and drops an acorn into the earth. One by one.

What looks like a gesture too small to matter becomes, over years, an answer to a land that has been waiting. Year by year, the land responds. Water returns. Forests rise. People come back. What was desolate begins to breathe again. The land had been waiting—not for rescue from afar, but for a human being willing to act as a co-creator rather than a consumer.

Though this story feels almost mythical, there are people like the shepherd in our world today.

When Sebastião Salgado and his wife, Lélia, returned to his family’s land in Brazil, they found devastation: more than 1,700 acres stripped by clear-cutting, eroded by flooding, emptied of animals and birds. The land was exhausted—functionally dead.

Sebastião wanted to remain in Paris, absorbed in his work as a renowned photographer. It was Lélia who asked the quiet, daring question: What if we replanted the trees?

Together, they began. Millions of trees followed. Slowly—against expectation—life returned. Springs re-emerged. Birds and mammals came back. The land did not merely recover; it was renewed. What had waited for decades found fulfillment through human hands willing to listen to what the land was asking for.

Nature cannot save itself. That is not how the Creator made it. Creation waits for human beings who remember the original story.

From the beginning, humankind was given a priestly role: to name, to tend, to guard, to offer the world back to God in thanksgiving. When we forget this, creation bears the wound. When we live it faithfully, creation responds.

Isaiah saw this long before us:

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad;
the desert shall rejoice and blossom.”
(Isaiah 35:1)

The leaf caught on the vine has not blossomed. Not yet. But it speaks of that promise. It tells us that waiting is not wasted time. That winter is not the end of the story. That redemption does not arrive with spectacle, but with small acts, repeated patiently, until the land blooms.

Creation still waits.

And every act of attention, restraint, and love—every time we step outside instead of looking through glass—is a sign that fulfillment is nearer than it appears.

Coming soon: a Living Books Press edition of The Man Who Planted Trees, paired with true stories of modern-day co-creators—ordinary people whose faithful work has allowed wounded land to breathe again.

Do you have a story of nature restored? Even simple ways matter, like growing a garden for the butterflies.

With blessings, as we wait together,

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment