The Tree That Split The Road

I WAS TAKING my daily walk to get my 10,000 steps. Part of my route takes me through the local park, and I have always thought that seeing trees and greenery is good food for the eyes.

 I also believe there is something important about seeing the seasons change with your own eyes. Today, I noticed that summer was ending. Fallen leaves had begun to appear over grass dried and yellowed by the summer heat.

 There is something comforting about seeing this happen every year. It reminds the unconscious part of us that perhaps doesn’t listen to words or believe our reassurances, but believes what the body sees.

 Somewhere deep in our genetic programming, there must be comfort in watching the seasons change. Whatever we are going through, life is still doing what it has always done. Summer becomes autumn. The leaves fall. Something ends, and something else begins.

As I continued walking, I noticed something for what felt like the first time. The road splits around a tree.

I found this strangely poetic.

 At some point, engineers must have been contracted to build these paths. One for bicycles and another for pedestrians, each with its required dimensions and regulations. Yet when they reached this beautiful old tree, instead of removing it, they split the paths around her and let them meet again on the other side.

 I became fascinated by this little power play. The tree is silent and still, with an almost eerie sense of wisdom about her. She is majestic and beautiful, but physically powerless. She cannot move, speak, protest their plans or fight their machines.

 The engineers could move. The tree could not. Yet the engineers moved, and the tree stayed.

I don’t know why they spared her.

 Maybe her tall figure and spreading branches were beautiful enough that her beauty defended her.

Maybe God influenced those engineers not to cut her down and protected her.

 Maybe her roots and history had earned her legal protection. Perhaps she had grown so old that cutting her down was no longer simply removing a tree, but destroying a piece of the area’s heritage. An old tree is, in some sense, a record of the prosperity of the land beneath it.

 Or perhaps the engineers and locals simply wanted another generation to admire the same tree.

I will probably never know.

 What fascinates me is that the tree did nothing extraordinary to acquire this power. She simply did what a tree is supposed to do.

 She rooted herself deeply. She grew. She survived winters and summers. She lost her leaves and grew them again. Season after season, decade after decade, she remained.

 Perhaps change and permanence are not opposites. The tree survives precisely because she participates in change. She loses her leaves, grows them again and ages, yet remains rooted in the same earth.

 Eventually, her existence became difficult to erase.

I think about the engineers who once stood there deciding what to do with her. They arrived with drawings, machinery and the authority to reshape the land. Perhaps some moved elsewhere or retired. Maybe some have already left this world entirely.

Yet the tree still stands where they found her.

 They had the power to cut her down, yet somehow she had acquired enough power to make them change their plans.

 The engineers moved, and the tree stayed.

There is something beautiful about that kind of power because it isn’t loud or invasive. The tree never demanded that the world accommodate her. She simply did what a tree is supposed to do, and did it for long enough.

 She rooted herself deeply. She grew beautifully. She endured.

 There is something almost like self-respect in that. She never tried to become anything other than what she was. She stood where she had taken root, grew as tall as she could and spread her branches as far as they would reach. Perhaps, over time, that quiet self respect gave her power.

 Maybe that is a form of power we don’t think about enough. Not the power to impose yourself on everything around you, but the power that comes from being deeply rooted in what you are for long enough that your existence itself begins to command respect.

The tree never asked anyone to bend for her.

She simply stood there long enough, rooted deeply enough and beautifully enough, that whoever walks in front of her must bend their way around her.