Live Your Life Like a Tree...

(By Gary R. Walden, updated 3/2024)

Trees are a symbol of Love, Inspiration Strength, Wisdom, Endurance and Beauty.

As I contemplated the life of a tree, I detected the remarkable similarities between them and ourselves. Their growth, changes, scares, endurance, and beauty that mirror our own lives.

Therefore, before I become an old tree myself and forget these thoughts, I put my words to paper of my vision of how the life of a tree reflects against our own life journey.I love trees, no two are the same. Trees are beautiful.

They start out small as a child does, they are fragile at first, needing care and protection. They begin to grow quickly, getting stronger with each passing day, such as a young person would. They are left to the elements of nature both nurturing and destructive, much of what a person would encounter throughout their journey of life.

They learn to bend, twist and sway in self-protection in every condition and situation that man, animal and nature can cast on them, yet they endure and become stronger through the conditions of its life, as we would, through the stages of our adulthood.

As the years pass their roots continue to grow longer and thicker in the foundation of the earth making them taller, more vibrant, and more beautiful. Their roots extend one way as their branches and leaves do so in the opposite direction, reaching to the sky and out to the sides like a 100-year morning stretch.

Trees become the mother and home for millions of creatures, a home that provides protection from man and the elements that once threaten itself, however, now, has the strength to shelter its new children. Much like those who are now watching their children grow up and start to move on.

Their outer skin of their bark becomes weathered with both thick and thin, deep, and shallow lines that proudly display their age, wisdom, strength, and endurance. The older the tree, the more beautiful it gets and so do we.Trees watch over us for decades, silently watching. They harness the memories of all that encircle them, the ones that climbed them and those that sat beneath them, like the grandparents we're about to become.

They are full of history and have seen so much as they observe their constantly changing surroundings. Much, if not everything, changes around them, yet they remain the same, they remain themselves, they remain a tree, they change for no one, they remain strong and beautiful.

The years of visible scars of affliction can be seen in detail if you look closely or from afar on its skin, however, it is these scars that make, "a tree",..."THIS TREE”, a one of a kind, different from the rest, yet it's what makes "THIS TREE” strong and beautiful.

Live Your Life Like a Tree… grow, embrace change, love your scares, endure what life throws at you, and be beautiful and strong through it all.