The Tree(s) of Hope

The powerful reminder of the strength living inside of each of us

Trees have played an important role throughout my entire life. I have always admired them. They grow so tall, powerful and strong. They withstand harsh weather conditions, recover from damage and no matter what, they stand there firm and keep growing older and more powerful, sometimes for hundreds or even thousand of years.

They give us oxygen to breathe, shade on a hot day, and fresh fruit in Autumn. I love to hug a tree as it fills me with peace and reassurance, a confirmation that everything will be all right because nature is powerful and looks after every one of us.

I grew up on my grandparent’s property, which included an acre of land. I loved the old-fashioned fruit garden, with half-a-century-old trees, riching high into the sky. Some of them were even taller than our 3-story house.

From my youngest days, I loved to play in the shade of these trees in Summer; in Autumn, I enjoyed collecting their fruit, and in Winter, it was so much fun to shake the heavy snow off their branches.

When I got a bit older and could climb, I jumped on their boughs for hours, just for fun. In Autumn, I loved to pick up their delicious fruit from their branches before it fell on the ground and got damaged.

Though most of the trees are dying now, being replaced by the modern short version of fruit trees, and the garden isn’t such a magical wonderland as it used to be, I have beautiful memories of my family, my parents, grandparents, auntie and cousin, all sitting under the large walnut tree, that with its bough and branches built kind of a gazebo.

This story, however, isn’t about the trees from my childhood or the majestic, nearly thousand-year-old trees I discovered while travelling on various continents.

No, this story is about my little tree, which I planted 14 years ago, and which keeps inspiring me day-by-day, week-by-week, year-by-year.

The tree you see in the photo below (which is the same as the tree in the title photo of this article) went through so much, yet it still hasn’t given up and keeps growing strong, reminding me that the adverse conditions we face during our life, do not matter because from nature we are strong. We must not allow our brains to tell us differently; we need to control our minds and remind ourselves that nature made us strong (the false whispers of our weak minds are our only real threat).

When I planted this tree, I didn’t have many internal fences, so my cattle came to the house area and damaged this little tree many times. Its soft and young leaves had to be sweet, and my pets loved it. I tried to protect my tree, but my lovely four-legged friends sometimes were faster than me.

Once, one of my steers pulled so strongly on a branch that a third of the tree broke off. George said I should just chop down the tree as it would most probably die, and even if it survived, it would never be strong again. Yet I decided to put this tree back together, lifted the broken part, attached it back to the tree and, with a rope, held it together. To my (and everyone else’s) surprise, the tree “accepted” the broken part, attached to the rest of the tree, building one trunk.

This tree went through floods, heatwaves, and droughts, and finally, in November last year, it got burned by fires. It looked dead, but I couldn’t remove it. Seeing a bare patch there would be too painful for me, and as part of my healing process and a way of dealing with the trauma the fires caused me, I left the tree there. When standing there without the leaves, it looked like it always looked in winter. Everything was… kind of normal, as if the fires never happened, as if everything was as it always used to be.

And, as you can see in the photo, luckily, I didn’t remove the tree, as it still wasn’t dead. It came back to life from its roots and is growing very fast.

Of course, I was told this tree won’t survive; it is not how you plant trees. The proper way to plant trees in your garden is to buy them from a nursery, where they are being propagated from seeds.

However, when I went for a walk in a park last week, I spotted the tree shown in the picture below. It is visible that the main tree died, and the bush-like tree is a composition of a number of saplings that grew from the tree’s roots. And I hope, one day, my tree will be as majestic as this tree I found at the creek in town.

Seeing how much this tree went through, how it is fighting to survive, and how it is succeeding gives me hope. It reminds me that, being a part of nature, I am so strong, too, and I need to believe in myself. I have to have faith and hope that everything will be fine, and then everything will be all right. Life will not necessarily be as I wanted it to be; nothing ever goes to plan, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be a great adventure and I can’t be happy. I just need to change my perception, adjust and adapt to the situation, and I can thrive, as the tree does.

We all are part of nature; we all have the strength living inside us; we just don’t realize how strong we are. Unlike the tree, however, we have a brain and our own mind, which should make us the most intelligent creatures on this planet. Yet it looks like we do not know how to use the power of our brain, and we turned it into a self-destructive instrument.

We don’t have faith, we doubt ourselves, we give up so quickly because we listen to the false whisper of our negatively programmed brain… Maybe it’s time to stop listening to the doubts in our minds, start looking around us at all the living creatures and learn from them. We are strong; nature made us strong; all we need is to believe in ourselves and let the power of nature, which is living inside us, do the magic.

This post was in response to Sahil Patel nature prompt

And here are a couple of articles of other writers from Reciprocal I enjoyed recently.

Me Writes summarises an article about a record number of COVID-19 vacines a person received. Was the original article true? You can read the article, too, and decide for yourself if you want to believe it or not.

Deana K Rodriguez writes about her articles in the Medium draft-folder, and I’m sure many writers will be able to relate to it (though I think 12 drafts isn’t that bad ;)

And Patrick OConnell teaches us very useful lessons, just in case we find ourselves in wilderness. For me, it was a great refresher of all the lessons my dad taught me when I was little and we used to camp a lot in the wilderness.