Tag Archives: community

The storm

Slick rock and wet leaves surrounding roots like toes curled in boots of tension and indecisive actions. Days of spring rain falling, half of you still a clear thought, amidst an exhausting amount of hopeful wishes.

How does this happen? How can it rain for days, soak everything around you but somehow half of you stays dry?

It’s because of your canopy. The depth of layered foliage that you’ve managed to grow and nurture. The learned responses to stress or unfamiliar moments that help you to become strong and thick.

It’s because of your tribe. Those that surround you and stay tight to your outermost branches, weaving their leaves with yours. It doesn’t matter that you are maple and they an oak, or you an ash and they a pine.

May you be surrounded. May you be thick with the gift of foliage. May you weather this storm and the next.

Just a bit of light

Light filtering, in a forest mostly dark and deep yet it finds a way, awakening the forest floor and a few ferns healthy and fortunate enough to root atop a rock, claiming their own kingdom.

Sometimes we have to own our own kingdom. We have to dive down deep into a rock or the most unkind place without soil, without warmth, and reach up through it all to overcome, so that the light can hit us.

Sometimes we have to have shallow roots and lightly dusted snow to refresh our memory of spring and the warmer days to follow. Our roots shallow so that we can survive knowing that it is all temporary any way.

But I want deep roots, entangled and nurtured by my fellow green nation friends. I want to be held and supported. I want to be strong for others. I want to be a part of a network, not just a tribe but a kingdom.

I want more than just a bit of light.

Short

I cross the field, partially frozen ground of water and ice bobbing surface, sending liquid to another crevasse not near me but somehow, still connected to my feet. Crunching, splashing, my wet feet navigating, weaving through a field that was solid but now shifts. All in an effort to reach the short one.

We say that seeing is believing. I think that’s where we get ourselves into trouble. We can always find what we are looking for and if we depend on seeing something then we’ve just sold ourselves short.

When I look at this stump I see what we don’t see. I see a fairy land with a large mountain. I see the sun setting on something that seems to be thriving, glowing. I see life even in the cold snow and ice. I see the results of what is a healthy root system.

I see a community of trees supporting one another and even though this one has little to show for it on the surface it is a part of a bigger whole, united.

What would happen if we didn’t see just the obvious? What would happen if we acknowledged and supported each other, even the little stumps?