There are teachers that walk on two legs, and there are teachers that stand rooted in silence.
The forest whispers its truths not through words, but through presence, patience, and the slow arc of time.
Each tree holds a mirror to our own becoming, reminding us that life and death are not opposites, but companions.
The life of a tree is a quiet teaching, unfolding in cycles of growth, death, and transformation.
Over the span of a tree’s life, it mutates and develops genetic variation most of which emerges after death. Once a tree begins to decompose upon the Earth, it offers vast genetic diversity to the ecosystem around it. A beautiful offering of life in death, allowing the environment to thrive.
The process of a tree’s death is a potent reminder of our own potential once we allow ourselves to surrender.
There is often great resistance to endings and to the unknowns they bring perhaps even fear. Yet it is in the darkness of the unknown that we lie in the fertile womb of our ever-unfolding path.
The Oak tree has much to teach. In its majestic and beautiful life, and in its gifting nature in death. Its decomposition reminds us that in our endings, we open ourselves to vast new possibilities.
One of our largest divergences away from nature has been in our need to control it the weeds, the cycles, the mystery of its own biological intelligence.
But nature does not control. It transforms. It grows, provides, and ascends into pathways of greater biodiversity and more complex life.
Systemic Insight
In systemic work, endings are never the end they are movements of belonging. Even what dies or cannot remain still has a place in the greater order. Like the Oak, which continues to nourish the forest long after it falls, what has been lost in our lives still holds meaning when it is given its rightful place.
Personal Reflection
I have been walking through the mother process in myself grieving the love that did not survive, the tenderness that could not make it into form. At first it felt like emptiness, like something stolen. But the more I sit with it, the more I see how even that lost love becomes part of my ground. It roots me in grief, yes, but also in strength and tenderness.
Reader’s Invitation
Where in your family line or in your own heart are you being asked to give a place to what was lost, so that it may nourish the soil of your becoming?
