luketilley

There is a tree outside my townhouse complex that has become, quite unexpectedly, a kind of spiritual landmark.

It stands apart from its neighbours—those obliging flowering trees that perform their brief, spectacular act each spring, their pale pink blooms holding the neighbourhood's attention for perhaps two weeks before retreating into eleven months of pleasant anonymity. They brown predictably in autumn. They serve their purpose, but they aren’t this tree.

This tree is different. Ten stories tall, maybe more. And on this particular November day, it blazed gold—thousands of leaves, still clinging to their branches despite the season's insistence, catching the light in a way that seemed less like nature and more like transfiguration.

I have seen this tree countless times. I have noticed it on some of those days. I have even appreciated it in that casual way we acknowledge beautiful things while our minds are already three blocks ahead.

But today, I stopped.

The stopping itself lasted only seconds. Yet in that brief suspension of forward motion, something shifted. It was just me and the tree. And the quality of that moment carried a strange recognition—the feeling you get when something entirely new somehow feels ancient and familiar, or when you meet a stranger and discover you've been known by them all along.

I have come to understand this stopping as an act of quiet resistance.

Our age excels at the erasure of place. In the relentless pursuit of scale and efficiency, we have built systems that cannot afford particularity. Uniqueness is expensive. Difference is difficult to optimize.

When the mandate is to extract maximum value, the specific and the local become obstacles to be smoothed away. Every place must become every other place. Every moment must be productive. Every attention must be captured and monetized.

But there is another erasure happening, quieter and perhaps more seductive. We have learned to construct our own Places-with-a-capital-P—curated communities built for comfort and alignment, filled with people who think like us, talk like us, worship like us. This is construction as dominion: remaking the world in our image. And when these Places no longer serve us, we can simply leave and construct another.

But in that moment, something shifted. I stopped—not quite by choice, but in response to something that asked it of me.

And in that stopping, I remembered: we are not called to Place-with-a-capital-P, to some abstract geography on a strategic map. We are called to this place. To whichever place we inhabit. This lowercase-p-place—particular, irreducible. Where my neighbours live not because we align but because we share this ground.

lowercase-p-place calls not for dominion but for stewardship. Not for construction that replaces what is, but for tending what has been given. It asks that we stop. That we notice. That we look up long enough to realize we already belong to one another and to this ground.

Standing before that golden tree, I finally understood what invited me to stop. Not because the tree had transformed into something other than itself, but because I had become present enough to see what was already true: that this tree was here, in particular. That it had always been here. That I had simply been too busy moving to notice.

The tree had been doing its quiet, patient work; its work of being itself without asking permission, without demanding attention, just being.

I know this moment will not return. The leaves will fall, the winter will come, and next year's gold—if it comes at all—will be a different gold entirely. But for those few seconds, I was there. Not somewhere else. There – in particular. Fully there.