Tree and Sky

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you." - Rumi

We've had a recent bizarre run of warm weather, especially for February, but overnight, the false springtime came to an end. The wind howled like a banshee, and it woke me many times from my sleep. Bleary-eyed, I confronted a cold morning that featured snow buds, of all things. Winter was back with a vengeance!

I grabbed my heavy winter coat and gloves, and decided to take a back way to work so I could drive by a favorite tree. Some of you may remember my discovery of the Baileyville white oak, which is the tree in this picture.

After driving by it for years, I finally stopped and visited the tree for the first time in January of 2016. And I have visited it about once a month ever since then. Somehow, though, the only additional picture I posted here on Blip is from the end of April of last year.

There is more to the oak's story, though. In June, one of the tree's main lower branches was injured during a summer thunderstorm. I felt absolutely sick when I drove past and discovered it. Soon after, I stopped for photos, but I did not want to post them here, to show you this poor wounded tree, as somehow something "lesser than" what it had been before.

But the farmer in whose field this tree sits, along route 45 near Pennsylvania Furnace, must be a good steward of trees. A few months after the original injury, I drove past and discovered the tree's broken branch had been carefully tended. All that remained was a wound on the side of the tree where the branch had been.

On this particular morning, I parked my car at a little cemetery nearby and walked over to see the tree in its field. The frigid wind blew right through my heaviest coat and squoze tears from my eyes.

The sky was doing dramatic things, with clouds and breaking light. I tried taking photos from a distance but they just ended up too dark; you couldn't make out the tree from the hills behind it.

So I did a thing I have never done before. I boldly walked through that farm field and right up to the tree, so that I could frame its wonderful branch shapes against the open sky. In this view, I thought it looked a bit like a Sleepy Hollow tree, something out of a Washington Irving tale. Was that the Headless Horseman who just galloped by?

I kept looking around, waiting for someone to shout, "Hey, get away from that tree!" For it was not my tree; not remotely my field. But nothing happened. No one came. It was just me and the golden farm field stubble, and that tree against the rolling hills and changing winter sky.

I was afraid that its injury would ruin this tree somehow: that it would cause its demise, or ruin its beauty. But I was wrong. The wound is healing, the tree is doing fine.

Our scars do not make us ugly. They are evidence not only of injury but of healing too. They are proof that we are stronger than the things that tried to break us: our strength, written large upon our selves. Our bodies, for better or worse, are our own walking stories of who we are, where we have been, what we have triumphed over.

I celebrate this tree and I am thankful for its life. I see its scars and find it beautiful still; maybe even more so. The soundtrack tune is Billy Joel, with Just the Way You Are.