A Tree and Me

The Giving Tree... a favorite book of mine and one that I used to read to my children often, is a wonderful illustration of love. As you know if you have read this blog before, I like trees... I like their beautiful forms, I like the nature of the roots, I like the resources they offer both as they live and after they are gone. I love all the things they supply to my hands and to my soul. I like them

The image here is of a tree in my area that I have photographed on a few occasions in various seasons. Some of new growth peeking out as the field is sprouting, ones of the fall colors being revealed (that are always there in fact, but hidden by the green of summer) and now this shot, recently... in the trials of winter. 

 This particular tree to me, in a season of newness and youth, uniquely has been like a joyful beacon, giving to me hope and strength and encouragement as it welcomes in the spring. Like the one in the children's book, I have wanted to be like it, offering these things to people around me...people I love. In the autumn, it has offered beauty to me, it's peace... vision...as it's colorful tones have contrasted with a blue sky on a sunlit fall day. Attributes I also want to share with others. But now, it seems to speak to me most in it's starkness and isolation, lonely on this hill. In seeing it today, I think of the winter before me, I feel it's twisting and bending in the cold winds without protection around it...fellowship. It's bark worn and tired, it's branches stretched and breaking, reaching into nothing in the massive negative space that surrounds it. Nutrients...like love...that once carried it even in the dark, are absent from it, shrinking as water pulling it's life, sheds away from it's feet. It's roots having been cut for the growing field around it and the time to provide shade and rest is no more. All it has to give is unwelcome and put away now in this season of natural death.

I hope that this particular tree will reach spring and find itself a refuge once again for the birds that will seek it's branches, that it will sprout with strength and renewed hope, bringing with it peace and quiet joy to those that come to it to find shelter and rest...to lie beneath it's canopy. That it's roots once again will find water, like words of affection, to carry it. I too hope for these things, but winter can be long and cold and harsh and too quiet.