The Hollow Tree

Many years ago, I was in a cult, living in Mendocino County, in California - that is a story for another day.

The place I was living at abutted an ancient redwood forest, and on my breaks, which were few, I’d walk through it every so often. It was magical.

There was this one tree that had been hit by lightning at its base. The tree still stood, but the center was hollowed out and the lightning strike had carved an organic entrance into its base.

Over time, it morphed into a temple and an altar. People would go there and leave stones or wishes or prayers inside the base of this massive, ancient tree. Walking in, you could feel the hallowed ground and sacredness.

The first time I saw it and walked into its belly, it moved me deeply. I sobbed for days and days, after. The tree had survived something that almost killed it - that actually did kill it in the most literal sense. But the thing that moved me most was that the lightning strike wasn’t the end of its story. It was now an altar; a temple and a source of holy communion for people. What killed it had transformed it into its greater purpose.

That day that tree felt like it was showing me the way of my own life. Like it was telling me, “It’s ok, my dear. Dying isn’t the end. It was a turn on the road to becoming. You are becoming. Who knows what temple or altar your life will become. Just know that it is. You are. And that surrender isn’t so hard once you surrender. It’s the resistance that makes it impossible to bear.”

On a body level I understood something that day that’s taken me years to begin to fully grok.

The lightning strike didn’t make that tree sacred: people walking into the tree’s wound made it sacred. The wound created the hollow, the hollow created an entrance, and the entrance was what let people and grace in.

To be clear, the tree wasn’t a comforting symbol. It was confronting in that it claimed something I wasn’t ready to; that the thing that nearly killed me might be the exact thing that lets grace and people in. That the wound wasn’t ‘damage’ I was carrying despite my purpose. That it was, in fact, the doorway to my purpose.

I fucking hate hallmark bs about suffering that ends in a neat little bow: pain + growth = purpose. No. That’s not how it works. Or at least, not most of the time. Or at least, not for me.

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The reality is, the tree was still scarred. Still a wound. It never healed over. It didn’t magically become whole again and then become a temple. It became a temple by remaining open. By staying hollow.

Looking back, I think I went into the forest, into the hollowed-out base of that tree, into my cult years - into so many years of my life - desperately trying to figure out how to close up my open wounds. But that’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

The world is a majestic, corrupted, painful, stinkingly brutiful place.

And the most courageous and challenging thing I do day-to-day is figure out ongoing how to stay open like a dead tree in an ancient redwood forest.

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