Tag Archives: trees

Piere and Sasha

Sasha was quick to respond to his bright smile and interesting bio. They had so much in common and she just knew that they’d be a great looking couple. It was their first date that disappointed her when she realized that he lied a little on his stats and was actually a bit shorter than she was. Like most women, she had a poor body image and needed someone larger than her to feel feminine and comfortable.

It’s been 3 months since they met on a dating app and Piere is still taking selfies standing in the foreground so that he appears taller than he really is. Sasha’s not sure if the relationship is going anywhere but heck, she’s having fun.

Safe start

New growth casting a strong shadow at the base of its elder whose bark is peeled and crusty and its trunk, at first curved onto something solid and safe, but then upright and confident, enabling it to create something new.

Sometimes we do not know what we’re doing or where we’re going and we bend and curve to what is asked of us not realizing that we’re just a crooked old tree until light, knowledge hits us and we reach up and create something new.

Are you playing it safe or are you reaching and creating?

Light

Light filtering on scalloped edges and veins creating new images. Some broad. Some clear.

Each day brings a new light and with it the opportunity to create something new in your life. It doesn’t matter if it’s a broad or narrow approach as long as you continue to reach and to grow, so that the light is able to filter through you and onto others.

They stand before us

They stand before us, dependent.

The next generation with wondrous eyes and trusting hearts whose unhardened tips are still kelly green and soft. They have yet to taste bitterness, hardship or disappointment.

They stand before us trusting we will love and nurture, shed our experiences and wisdom like a delicate bed of pine needles, encompassing and sheltering their future.

They stand before us expecting a fertile and viable soil to cultivate, just as we expected of our elders who believed in us enough to honor and preserve the earth.

They stand before us and ask that we give them the same opportunities that were given to us, and to love and cherish the land and each other, so that they can have thick bark and strong deep roots to endure the storms, and lasting branches of foliage green with energy from the sun.

She calls to herself

She calls to herself.

A gentle warm breeze infused with pine and hemlock reminded her to breathe, to come back from wave upon wave of thought. Some important but most not.

She knew that this moment was all that she really had. She was determined take her spirituality seriously this time because she could feel a strong connection to her higher self, that eternal self, calling to her with each and every moment. She made the eternal self promise to keep calling her.

She knew it would be more difficult in the beginning, to stand in the present moment. That maintaining the holy instant was kind of like trying to balance on the head of a pin but she didn’t care. She wanted this.

The breeze blew again. Breathe.

She calls to herself.

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 below the surface

He stands out among the others, older yes, and yet somehow full of life without his shell. His exterior has no bark. Lines, so many lines, some deep and wide and others narrow yet most curve and connect, a whole colony of experience.

We don’t have to wait until we are old and worn to change. We don’t have to wait until all of the things in our life eat at us and make tunnels and holes and cracks. We don’t have to wait until what bugs us begins to connect and make a pattern. We don’t have to wait until it causes our bark to peel away and expose our inner hardened eaten self that allowed it to happen.

We can free what is just below the surface and be our true self.

Wild Lilly

Through the old leaves and sticks and pine bark. Through the forest floor and foundation that was once someone’s home. Here in the back woods the wild lillies dominate the landscape, enduring, populating. The lillies once just a small part of someone’s garden, maybe the feature or just a cheap way to cover the ugly spots and uneven landscape, but not wild. Now they multiply out in roots and send up shoots of hope and promise and renewal against a backdrop solid and unmoved through decades of witnessing life.

As we age we our thoughts and desires become more rigid. We solidify our persona almost as an act of declaration, determined to be right and make less mistakes.

We loose the joy and freedom of navigating the unknown and learning something unexpected, soft and dynamic.

Challenge yourself to send out roots and shoots. To go past your solid foundation, out into the unknown of the forest floor. Past the leaves from last year and the debris from the last storm.

Past what is known and into an expanse to the unknown.

Sheer will

After a heavy wind, the kind that takes you out in fragments, scattering chips, and limbs and needles. Making you wonder what just happened. It starts with just one bite but then grows to a colony of doubt and insecurity, fear and uncertainty. You become hollow, just a shell of mild expression, seeming strong and unfailing.

Sheer will gets you through the tough times even when you don’t realize how fragmented you really are. When a strong wind will bend and break what seems to be solid, and someone has to come along and pick you up from the side of the trail.

That is when you try again.