Lessons from Trees

I sit in the comfort of my home this sunny, cool morning, listening to the chatter of birds as they sate themselves on seed just outside my window. I watch as the breeze moves through the branches of a young tree, the leaves quivering, waving, spinning.  For just a moment I watch the tissue box on the table wave back as the breeze pours in through the screen.

I sit here with both gratitude and wonder, feeling the morning aches that remind me that my body is gradually betraying me, and I gaze out again, this time at the slowly failing maple tree at the corner of our yard.  Last week our arborist gave her a good look-over, assuring us that this tree has “three to ten good years left”.  I feel a solidarity with this tree, and the thought of taking it down somehow feels like a violence against everything imperfect in this world. 

This is not an “old” tree, but a maple planted by the previous owner some 40 years ago - directly under electrical lines.  I admit a bit of judgement around this choice...What were they thinking? 

And then again, what living being enters this world without some barriers and uncertainty?

Forested trees erupt into a world of both competition and cooperation; our local squirrels are born amongst the neighborhood barred owl and Cooper’s hawk; and our children into lives of risks, known and unknown. My own generation was born into a world precariously balanced between stability and instability: the Vietnam War raged, we were barely a generation past race riots leaving the scars of a heavily segregated hometown, and political dis-ease was felt by many throughout the country. Closer to home were generational traumas, unseen or unacknowledged, but present and passed along.  Each of us has our own set of “electrical wires” to grow under and around. 

Mystic and author James Finley reminds me that “the presence of God spares us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things,” and this maple has continued to be sustained and thrive in her own way.  By most standards, she is not a “pretty tree”.  In addition to enduring storms and the rough pruning by the utility company over the years, she grows in the shadow of two great neighboring oaks, some 100 years old. The place in which she was planted is something that has given her character as she recovers from wounds and stretches for light.  This tree provides resources for squirrels and birds, shade for our walking neighbors, and there is untapped gift in her sap. She seems accepting of her many scars, attempting to unfold her leaves each spring and put on her full glory of color in the fall. 

This corner tree also shows signs of wisdom as she has come to “self-prune”.  She no longer attempts to maintain every branch, but instead puts energy into those that best sustain and give her life, allowing the others to fall to the ground.

As I consider this fellow being, feeling the Spirit in both her and myself, I hear Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John, “He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.”  I, like the tree, have been roughly pruned on occasion. Like the careless work of the utility company, it has sometimes felt painful and random. Other pruning has come in the form of big storms, including divorce and loss.  Stretching and growth sometimes meant attempting to grow out of the shadows cast by another, stretching so that I can live fully in the light that belongs to all.  And then there have been the hands of a caring arborist - a gentle pruning that might look like the work of a good counselor, spiritual director, or the words of a wise elder. 

As I get older and wake up with those morning aches, the same years that have changed my body have also given me the wisdom of self-pruning.  I no longer contort myself as I once did, but instead grow in my ability to discern and prune away habits and practices that no longer serve the truth of who “I am” in God.  We can each stand in our imperfection, deeply rooted in the knowledge that “the Spirit of God dwells” in each of us (1 Cor 3:16) as we bear the gifts that only we can bear.