I have a favorite spot of woods near my house. It’s on the hill up above our reservoir. It’s a good spot for picking ramps in the springtime, offers some great places to sit and gaze at the water, and it’s also the location of one of my favorite trees.
Every time I walk through I have to check and see if she’s still there. I mean, it’s not as if a tree could just get up and walk away, but another tree might fall on her or she might get blown over. Things happen. Even to trees.
Why am I so fond of this particular tree? It’s because, unlike all the trees around her, which stand fairly tall and straight and stoically tree-like, my tree dances. By which I mean that she sinuously undulates up towards the light. The obvious explanation for this peculiarity is that at one point or another, she was more crowded than she is currently, so she had to reach this way and that to get some access to the light she needed. Now, though, whatever pressure motivated her reach has receded. She exists relatively unencumbered. But she’ll never be straight and stoic again, if she ever would have been in the first place. Now, and for as long as she manages to keep her feet, she dances.
Generally, when I do a Sh*t To Help You Show Up edition of the newsletter it’s because I have some resource I want to share with you all. A book, podcast or article that I think might aid in your integrity practice, as it has in mine. But this week I’m on the hunt for a metaphor and I’m hoping you can help me instead.
My dancing tree gets me partway there. She’s rooted, yet changing. Strong, but supple. She’s clearly been transformed by her life into something unexpected and different. She’s a little off. A wee bit touched, as they say. But she’s also clearly tenacious. She has stuck to her spot and outlived everything that tried to crowd her out or overreach her.
She reminds me of another plant I saw once that grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go. It was a shock of dandelions pushing out of a tiny spot of dirt no bigger than a quarter between the blacktop of the parking lot outside of the Seattle train station and an old metal track running right through the middle. I was 23 when I saw those vibrant, defiant weeds pushing up out of the tarmac on my walk to work one day. The feeling of recognition was so strong I carried them on the inside of me until I could finally get them tattooed on the outside of me when I was thirty-seven.
Now, at 51, I’m on the hunt for a new metaphor. Or maybe it’s really a simile I’m after— a clear, but unexpected correspondence between this and that. My dancing tree gets to some of the groundedness I’m trying to articulate, and her undulation pleases me, there’s no denying it, but there’s an element of softness that she’s missing. My defiant dandelions were missing it, too. So, what is the metaphor for how we soften, hopefully, as we move through life, becoming less rigid, more flexible, even as our striving for some kind of consistent authenticity and integrity grounds us?
For instance, an oak tree is never going to be, say, a maple. It will only ever be an oak. Similarly, I can only ever be the one I am, not anyone else. So, there’s some essential truth of who I am that is held constant.1 At the same time, I'm experiencing a softening over time towards myself and other people. An opening to complexity and the inevitability of change. Are you experiencing this?
When looking back at choices I made or ways I behaved in the past through my current lens of understanding I could berate myself for being wrong, shortsighted, or misguided. I could get hung up on “I should have known better.” Instead I find myself remembering that I was always doing my best with what I knew at the time. In the face of the discrepancies and differences between current me and past me the only choice, then, is mercy, finding some softness toward my self.
Once I’m on the mercy-for-myself train then I can’t help but look around me and think about all the other people that are simply doing their best, too, who deserve to be on the train with me. Wishy-washy prevarication this is not, as if nobody ever does anything wrong and needs to be held accountable. But it is a refusal to act as if people are fixed entities incapable of change. It’s also an acceptance that what constitutes practicing our integrity changes right along with us. How could it not?
This mercy for ourselves and others, this acceptance of change and transformation even as we strive to keep our feet, to remain grounded in the place and the self apportioned to us, requires a fierce softness, it seems to me.
So, tell me. When you think of things that are strong but also soft, grounded and yet flexible, what do you see in your mind’s eye? If you had to describe that exact sort of thing (strong, yet soft, like a ____), how would you describe it?
What’s the right metaphor?
Last week’s newsletter came out a little late, on Sunday, which was odd. In case, you missed it, here it is:
Were you ever fascinated by tree rings as a kid? How they could tell you how many years old a tree was and whether or when there’d been enough food and water? The clear record of where the tree had been even as it stayed in one place set my brain afire with imagining.
I'm going on 79 and climbing a tree is the last thing I can do, my daughter would have a cow but when I was a girl we had a Chinese Elm in our yard and at the very tippy top was a Y set of branches just the right size for my behind. I had three sisters who were all more outspoken than I was, I had asthma so I couldn't always keep up with them but I had my tree. When I got tired of them picking on me I went up the tree and stayed there till "I" was ready to join the world of family again. That tree saved me so many times. About a year ago I looked out my window at the neighbors tree, up in the tippy top was a young girl, our neighbor. She had a book in hand and ever so often I'd look to see if she was still there and she was. I wanted to say hello and tell her about my tree but thought better of it and left her to her privacy but realized I had a kindred spirit right next door...thank you for reminding me. Your tree is lovely.
In answer to the question of a metaphor, one thing that came to mind right away was a willow tree - a weeping willow tree. It's still a tree... but it's branches are supple and softer. They sway in the wind and hang like tassels or cords, but the tree also has a very solid trunk, and is well rooted in itself. There is perhaps a cautionary tale that I also love about this tree, a story that my sweetie shared with me about wanting to jump into its embrace one day when he was small, and getting stuck in all the entwining branches, like a weaving or a web. His mother (who was later to become less of the heroine in his story) had to come and rescue him from the trees embrace. It almost feels, in the hearing of it, like the tree was trying to keep him, and didn't want to let him go. I'm not sure that fits the exact metaphor you're looking for, but it seemed a thing to share here. :-)