“Healing the Mother Tree”

This past summer, our family visited Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks.  We stood in the shadow of some of the largest trees in the world, a few of which have been alive since before the birth of Jesus.  The trunks and crowns of these trees show evidence of the struggles they have lived through, damage caused by falling neighbors and scarring from fire.  Yet, remarkably, if given enough time, the trees heal themselves.  The bark surrounding their scars gradually grows inward, until the wounds disappears entirely within their core.

Sometimes Mother Trees carry terrible scars.

It was Labor Day, 1954.  Mamma and Pappy, Ronnie, and my two-year-old mother, had gathered with their extended family for a picnic.  Ronnie, only five years old at the time, ran off to play with his cousins.  Soon, the other kids came running back in a panic.  Ronnie wasn’t with them.

Trying to keep up with his bigger cousins, Ronnie had reached out and grabbed the neighbor’s electric fence while his feet were in a stream.

One day near the end of her life, I remember my grandmother telling me about the aftermath of the accident.  According to her recollection, my grandfather simply unraveled at the seams, overwhelmed by grief.  My mother was a toddler at the time.  She needed to be cared for.  So Mamma crawled to her feet and kept going.

It reminds me of Suzanne Simard’s descriptions of one of the Mother Trees:

“The Douglas-fir Mother Tree looked as though she’d been through a knothole sideways, crown ragged from the felling of her neighbors and her trunk scarred from a skidder backing into her, but she had produced plenty of cones…Black-capped chickadees loved her for this and hopped along her branches.  I admired her determination to carry on, to care for her young in spite of the shock of her losses.”

With the support of her mother and sisters, Mamma survived.  Time gradually closed her wounds, but I don’t believe there was a day that Mamma didn’t wake up missing Ronnie.  That scar remained forever at the center of who she was.

Meditation: Which words of wisdom do you most need to hear today?

• Never give up — Just take one step at a time.

• Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

• It’s okay to not be okay.

• Only by the grace of God.  Even though you think you will die, you don’t. You keep on living one day at a time, although some days it could be more a minute at a time.  You find a blessing in your sadness. You follow the Alcoholics Anonymous guidance: “Let go and let God.”