Tree as metaphor

This old, gnarled tree is right outside my kitchen window, just a few yards from the side of the building. Its branches turn this way and that, many of them broken or missing from one side, and there are hollows inside the trunk and light brown, rough bark that looks weather-beaten and somehow worn out. It's beautiful to me, because even though it appears to be dead, it isn't. It's getting tiny bits of new growth here and there, and it is an incubator for owlets and a pit stop for countless birds.


Somehow, when I look out the window at this unsightly, old tree, it's like looking at myself in a mirror and seeing an exterior that is aging and graying and gaining new unpleasantries almost daily -- yet inside, there is still some sap of new ideas, new dreams, and that all-important sense of hope and purpose rising. That tree seems to be a reflection of me.


Not only do I watch for birds to gather in the branches and enjoy the birdsong that forms a chorus, but I know that an owl (and maybe its babies) are sheltered inside. It's a tree that should grow a tongue to tell its history -- all of the stories it has collected over the long years it has stood sentry here.


The very fact that I cannot tell you what kind of tree it is was a big contributor to my desire to enroll in the master naturalist class that starts next month. I feel an urgent need to start to put names and characteristics to all of the wondrous bits of nature I see all around me, for if I can't identify what it is and where it fits into the jigsaw puzzle of nature all around me, then I can't write about it -- can't make you see it except by taking a photograph of it. And a person can't write about what she doesn't know.


So, in many ways, I owe this tree already -- for opening my eyes and ears, for nudging my curiosity, for reawakening my latent love for the natural world.


And if it should fall, that tree, and there is nobody to hear it, I know that it will still make a noise. It has already spoken to me.