THE FOREST SYMPHONY: Trees, Veins, and the Math God Hid in Both
On an unusually warm winter night in December 2024, we brought our daughter’s little piano out into the yard, and beneath a whole canopy of stars, she played. She was only sixteen months old, but her love for this world was already so plain: the gardening, the music, the stargazing. It is such a gift to watch.
Later that night, I returned to my laptop and notebook to look through the photographs I had taken. There was little Dallas, with a Marley cameo, the two of them looking like the coolest duo alive, playing a set beneath the stars.
Dallas is almost three now.
And our dear, sweet Marley transitioned to Heaven on Christmas Day of this year.
Our forest has witnessed nights filled with music, slow walks around the yard, and the quiet loneliness that began walking beside us after Marley went to Heaven. Even now, I still find myself expecting to see him emerge from between the trees, sixteen and a half years of faithful companionship taught my heart to expect him always by my side.
Maybe especially now, I find nature comforting.
When I titled my book Return to Nature, I did so because, to me, returning to nature has always been a return to God. His artwork. His fingerprints. His signature. The more closely I look, the more impossible it becomes to separate the Creator from His creation. I find His signature tucked into every corner of the natural world, and knowing He has divinely connected all of it makes everything feel a little bit like magic.
How blessed am I to have walked sixteen and a half years of my life beside Marley? How blessed is my whole family that we were given all this time to love one another at all?
It astonishes me when I think about the sheer improbability of being here, in this exact moment, and about how quietly, thoroughly interconnected we all are. Nature is not separate from us; it is within us. A tapestry of fragments woven together in a way only He could.
Consider this.
The mathematics that allow a tree to gather sunlight are astonishingly similar to the mathematics that deliver oxygen throughout your own body. One stretches toward light. The other carries life to every waiting cell. They could hardly appear more different, yet beneath them both lies the same elegant architecture, quietly repeating itself, as though the Creator found something so beautiful, so efficient, so complete that He chose to write it into creation again and again until the pattern became impossible to miss.
I will absolutely be teaching my daughter that math and science are their own kind of magic.
During our nature walks, Dallas picks up little treasures and collects them in a container she calls her “magic potions.” Her eyes are always scanning, always gathering, always questioning the world around her.
“Mom, where does the chipmunk live?”
“Mom, what do deer eat?”
“Look, Mom, a bird in the tree!”
These are the kinds of moments I love sharing with her during our walks through the woods. We stop often. We look closely.
“See how the trunk becomes limbs? The limbs become branches. The branches become twigs.”
The longer we linger, the more a tree begins to reveal that it isn’t growing at random at all. The same pattern repeats itself again and again until what first seemed ordinary begins to feel like a language. Mathematicians call those repeating patterns fractals.
And once you learn its language, you begin recognizing its handwriting everywhere.
The same branching design quietly unfolds inside your own body. Your aorta gives way to arteries, the arteries to smaller vessels, until life reaches even the tiniest corners of you. One gathers light. The other delivers life. Different purposes, yet the same elegant geometry quietly unfolding, repeating itself with such faithfulness that it begins to feel less like coincidence and more like a signature.
God, it seems, wrote this one design across the whole of creation.
And the genius of it is efficiency. A fractal is how nature covers the most space with the least material, how a tree fills the sky and how your blood fills your body, both reaching everywhere while wasting almost nothing. It is as though nature asked itself, once, “How do I make this both beautiful and unbelievably functional?” and then answered in trees and rivers and lungs and lightning and the veins of a single fallen leaf.
God is, quite simply, amazing.
Creation has a way of returning to its lessons.
It is now July 2026. Hundreds of wildfires burning across Canada have sent smoke drifting thousands of miles across North America, turning familiar blue skies hazy and tinting sunsets deep shades of copper. Air quality alerts have stretched far beyond the fires themselves, reaching communities that never saw a single flame, yet still found themselves breathing its consequences.
As I tried explaining to Dallas why we couldn’t go outside, she asked where Canada was.
I realized I was struggling with the same thing she was.
How could something so far away become something we could smell?
Something we could breathe?
I will teach her the geography.
But honestly, even I struggle to fathom how something burning so far away can find its way into our own backyard.
While reading about the tiny PM₂.₅ particles carried in the wildfire smoke, I stumbled upon a description that instantly carried me back to that warm winter evening years earlier. Scientists often compare our lungs to an upside-down tree. The windpipe becomes branches. Those branches become smaller branches still until they end in millions of tiny air sacs where oxygen quietly meets the bloodstream.
Even the way we breathe is a tree growing inside us.
And the very architecture that allows us to receive the breath of life is what leaves those delicate spaces vulnerable to the smallest intruders.
Creation has never been a collection of separate things living side by side. It is a living relationship. Trees, lungs, rivers, blood vessels, lightning, neurons, even the galaxies stretching beyond what our eyes can see, all branch according to the same quiet wisdom. Different stories. Different scales. The same Author. What happens to one part of creation has a way of traveling quietly through the rest.
I think back to that warm winter night. I was not thinking about any of this. I was simply watching my daughter’s small hands find the keys beneath a sky full of stars, feeling the quiet magic of it, the branching trees above her, the branching galaxies above them, the branching vessels carrying the rhythm of her own small heart, all of it the same design, all of it His.
A melody of magic, tuned to the frequency of love.
This land is not only for those of us here in this lifetime. It is for all things intricately connected, past, present, and future.
In Scripture, breath is never just oxygen.
It is life.
Perhaps that’s why I keep returning to the image of my daughter beneath the stars, her tiny hands finding the keys while the trees swayed gently overhead. Before there was melody, there was breath. Before there was song, there was life. Perhaps creation has been singing that truth all along.
May the lives we live revel in the magic of tiny movements and always remember that we are connected in far more ways than we could ever fully know.
