A Life Like A Tree

Prose by Paul Munguia

I can picture it.

A life like a tree. 

Standing firm. Standing only as a tree.

And nothing more.

Lineage of the soil. Kin to the earth. Kith of the birds that make use of me.

A life where I learn the storms. I watch them roll in. I feel the wind and the rain shake me. 

Shake my leaves. So hard that the little pieces of me fall to the ground.

I can imagine them on their way down. Their tiny appendages reaching out, toward where they came from. Pleading for me, to for a second, abandon my nature, and to stop being a tree. To gain dexterity. To move swiftly and rescue them. Then to reattach them to me.

But I can’t. Because I’m a tree.

It’s not that I don’t want to. I certainly feel their pain. The pulling, the tearing — the releasing of our bond.

The sadness is true. 

The loss is palpable. 

My being tenses; I want to shut my eyes. 

I wish the loss weren’t real.

But the heaviness reminds me that I am a tree, and if I am to remain one, I must accept that letting go is a part of being me.

I feel the seasons change. 

I feel the sun again. It stays on me for more hours of the day. 

I am rewarded with new leaves. The breeze blows through, the birds return, and we all dance in place momentarily. Then we rest, proudly.

I appreciate the stillness while I can. I endure the movement when it comes. 

I lose then gain then lose again. But I trust that this is all a part of my nature and that I will continue to bloom with the seasons. That there is a reason for the cycles.

That all truth depends on me being me. A tree.

My purpose as a tree doesn’t feel monumental, but I get the sense that my purpose is also more than I know. 

I remind myself that in combination with the billions of other trees around the world, I sustain life. I provide shade; I house families. 

That’s all enough. 

I am not the biggest tree. The tree with the most leaves, nor the most robust branches. I don’t embrace the mere quantity of my offspring. I don’t boast about the oxygen I yield. I am just me, a tree.

I stay alive for as many seasons as I can. But I accept that where I come from is where I will at some point return.

And one day I accept that you need me more than I need my life.

I hear your car door shut. Your feet hit the dirt. I watch you stretch your arms over your head. It must have been a long drive to me.

I revel at your ability to move. I hear the crunch of my old leaves under your feet as you approach me.

You look up and marvel at my longevity. You put your hand on my bark. 

Then you yell over to your friend. Something about my grandness. My endurance. 

You ask, “I wonder what all this tree has seen?”

Your friend joins us. They also look up toward me. They understand my grandness. 

I begin to understand it.  

Your friend feels small next to me. 

I remind them how similar they are to you.

They too put their hand on my bark. Then reach up at my branches. But their arms don’t come close to grasping mine. 

You laugh at them. You laugh more at the honesty of their attempt than at their individual ability. You laugh because you too felt the same childlike instinct to try and connect with me.

Then it happens. Something only nature can provide. 

With both of your hands on my bark, you receive a glimpse into a reality you’re not used to knowing. For a split second, there is a reckoning, a dawning — a pause in your own created world. 

Then you feel a connection to the natural one.

Suddenly you understand that life is far more vast and mysterious than the house you’re about to build for the family you love. Or the job that paid you the money to buy the chainsaw you’ll use to cut me down.

You get a vision of the clouds that formed to bring the rain that filled the river that smoothed the rocks, nurtured the fish, and wound hundreds of miles to sustain me. 

For a split second, you’re hit with the history of hundreds of years. And you gain a reverence for my life and the sacrifice I am about to make to provide you shelter.

In that moment, you know that we are one. 

Lineage of the soil. Kin to the earth.

That we’re all headed toward where we all came from.

That all truth, all empirical reality, exists in a glimpse like that.

In any reverence for another’s life.

And in that moment, it is not only you who is the student. I, too, understand why I was given existence. To show you of yours and consequently of my own.

That the cycle continues, but only through connection. That true purpose sometimes only comes when the end is imminent.

When I picture it, this life like a tree, I feel thankful for you lending me your identity. 

I wonder what is my own? When I will see me. 

When I will know a life like a tree.

Paul Munguia enjoys writing about the times when he feels connected to reality. Sometimes, the stories are positive, and sometimes, they just need to be told.