Naked Branches in Winter

An old walnut orchard in January 2009 near Los Molinos, California.

Huge tractors removed this entire orchard in 2014.
Mostly replanted with almonds.
Almond orchards in blossom in February are a spectacular sight.

"Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky,
How beautiful it is?
All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness
There is a poem, there is a song.
Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring.
When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with
The music of many leaves,
Which in due season fall and are blown away.
And this is the way of life."
-  Krishnamurti  

"One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
An, nothing himslef, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
-  Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man, 1923