Janet and I moved to Cheshire in December. We miss the Yorkshire Dales. It’s pretty flat around here. But there are lots of oak trees. We didn’t notice them until they starting dropping acorns which often carpet sections of our local walks.

Seeing the acorns in their bespoke little cups takes me back to childhood days. I used to love to pick up and bring home the most beautiful ones. Sadly they would wrinkle and change colour and come loose from their cups and lose my interest. And now the acorns here are turning brown and the carpet crackles underfoot as they harden and we tread on them.

There are chestnut trees here also. They take me back on the same route to exciting times gathering conkers at the start of the (primary) school year each September. There were places we’d go with my mother to pick up the ugly spiky green husks dropped by the trees, with their sleeping beauties inside, or those already ejected from the crib and lying about on the ground. Then, as now, I wonder at the extraordinary beauty of the conkers, cocooned like perfectly polished mahogany in their lily white beds.

If there weren’t many conkers lying beneath the tree, we (my bothers and I) would climb the tree and knock down the shells. But often, we’d open them up to find the conkers white and (as I thought) ugly inside. They had their time to fall and we’d come too early.

On a good day we ‘d go home with bagfuls of conkers. We’d hole them and string them and play conkers by swinging them to hit the opponent’s conker (or frequently their hand – ow!) in a battle to see which broke up first. There was always a champion conker with the most victories.

Some conkers went into the oven to be hardened or were soaked in vinegar. We took these to school for the real battles which occupied most children during break for several weeks in September and October.

The transient beauty I’m thinking about is certainly seen in the acorns and chestnuts that fall from the trees, and is repeated year on year. It fades and is trampled into the ground but out of the carnage of thousands of conkers and acorns, some take root and new tree grow.

Beauty is dynamic. it doesn’t exist except in the eye of the beholder, in the relationship. In my child’s eyes the beauty of acorn or chestnut was fleeting and soon forgotten. Yet it left its mark. It formed me. The child I was is still a part of me, still shapes me. And the acorns and chestnuts go on to fulfil their purpose despite losing their first beauty. Losing their first flush of beauty is essential – the death of the seed is necessary for it to be changed and to grow into a new tree.

Let’s not forget the lasting beauty and magnificence of the trees themselves. Beautiful as a seed, and beautiful in the sustained full vigour of life. And perhaps beautiful in ‘death’ – providing wood for a treasured table or picture frame, or simply warmth as they are sacrificed in the fire.

Having lived in Sudan and Uganda where the seasons are very different (e.g. long rains and short rains) I have a deep love for the annual cycle of seasons which is so easy to take for granted. It’s a cycle of life, fruitfulness, death and renewal. Trees are subject to this cycle but, like us, have a grander cycle of life, sometimes over hundreds of years from acorn to tree to a natural demise and reabsorption into the earth. Every year leaves its mark on the tree and is recorded in its rings of life.

We often think that everything is, ultimately, transient. There is a truth there, but my reflection leads me to think it’s better to say ‘everything changes’.

Like the seed that is planted and is changed into a tree, we are born from a seed and have our seasons and regular cycles of life. Through it all we are being changed again and again until we die and become a seed once more planted and changed to live in the beauty and mystery of all that lies beyond death – when what is mortal takes on immortality. (So St Paul in the New Testament, in his first letter to the Corinthians , chapter 15 verses 50-54)

I find the words of John Keats (Ode on a Grecian Urn) equally inspiring:

Beauty is truth; truth beauty – that is all

ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.