Everyone knows that if you cut down a tree, you would be able to count each cyclical line beginning at its center to determine how long the tree has been living. Each year, a tree grows a new layer of bark and covers up the change and damage done in the past year. It's beautiful that such a solitary thing can be so alive and changing. What we don't pay much attention to is the stories embedded within each ring. The cracks, the gnarled knots and varying width of each ring. Small details revealing the bounty or scarcity of each year. Thick rings revealing strong growth, a summer full of warmth and rainfall while thin rings indicate a cold and bitter winter or drought. Rounded edges that protrude from the natural circular pattern in v-shaped crevices tell of its maturity out of a sapling in which it began to grow branches that stretched out towards the sun. Rings that are often squished together tightly tell the sweet story of growing close in the company of other trees, like aspen groves scattered across mountainsides. When the bark is cracked and splintered, a story of survival is at hand. Maintaining life through the extreme heat of wildfires or bitter frosts of winter. When the rings become uneven on one side, we catch a glimpse of a feeble attempt at shifting sideways away from its roots; redirection in pursuit of the sun. Where rings curve inward over a period of time, we witness the birth of new branches.
We can learn a lot from the trees.
Cracking and splitting, they age but they grow, twisting their tough bodies upward like a prayer. Leaves may come and go, the untold stories carried off by the wind until new buds spring forth again and again and again, desperate to document the seasons. The sacred and resolute pilgrimage of life in the very skin of the tree.
The piles of unfinished pages clutter my nightstand, my desk, my mind and even the console of my car like the remnant of untold summer stories glistening in the damp piles of leaves cornered in the yard. Seasons of rainfall or drought, I want to write out the stories of my splitting bark and the beautiful moments of birth, grief, joy, friendship, and hardship embedded in the rings. I want to leave behind leather-bound words to my children and their children, but I do not want to wait until I am gone to speak and to share the sacred and resolute pilgrimage of my own life, in my own gnarled knotted heart, making its feeble attempts to find the sun and stretching upward like a prayer.
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