When hiking on Cougar Mountain outside of Seattle, I found a tree growing out of an old, decaying, moss-covered cedar stump. I dubbed it the Resurrection Tree.
The new tree was not a cedar but some other kind of pine whose seed had dropped into the decaying mass to create a tenacious, determined new life. It was already about twenty-five feet tall and quite a few feet in circumference with its roots thick and draped over the old stump. The roots clung to the bark of the old cedar, nourishing the new tree as they reached further downward each year until they finally found purchase in the loamy earth.
The old cedar stump was a good ten feet high and at least 16 feet in diameter, the remnants of a massive, majestic tree that must have succumbed to old age, disease, or some force of nature that broke it and seemingly destroyed its life.
Yet some little seed, teaming with new life-potentiality and blowing quite high off the ground, settled nearly dead-center in the old stump. With the seedling so high off the ground, animals could not snack on it and so it grew. But rather than being able to send its shoots deep, it had to send them wide until they grew over the stump in every direction.
This image of resurrection is a good place to begin a blog in a year of my life that has been full of death and resurrection, as I suppose any life truly is. With deaths both imagined and real in these last twelve months, this tree reminds me that wondrous, and sometimes unimaginably strong, life takes purchase and grows in new and different ways than I could have imagined.
The decaying sadness that our circumstances offer up now and again does not have to be the last word for a tenacious, determined person. But like the seedling that found new life and reached out in every direction to ensure its survival, we too can not only survive but thrive as we send our roots out through the darkness of loss and sadness.
New life is sometimes found in the most unusual and unexpected places. All we have to do is keep reaching for it.