Grow Around It
I’m hiking along a mountain trail, and I come across this tree that one day long ago ran into a problem. As its roots probed down they confronted a boulder. The process might have gone something like this: ———- “We can’t grow into solid rock!” the roots yell. “We’re at a dead stop. Should we call it quits and just be a small tree?” —“No,” says the tree’s command center. “How big is the boulder?” “So big you can’t believe it. All we feel is rock.” —“Can’t you push it out of the way?” “No. It’ll probably push us…
New Life out of Old
On a hike I come across an old, fallen tree, its wood rotting. Out of it grows a sapling. The sapling is not growing out of the ground; it’s growing out of the tree. New life out of old. Some might say it’s like reincarnation, but no, the sapling is not a rebirth of the dead tree. It grows from a seed off a standing tree and finds its nourishment in the decaying wood of the fallen tree. The dead tree only provides the place for the new tree to grow. We often talk about this kind of…
