A tree, a flat tire, and the messiness of being human

Listen to me read the post…

Melancholy. That’s what’s most present for me today.

It’s not unusual for the first day home after a trip to feel this way, but this time there are added reasons. It’s the ache of boarding a plane, after a beautiful week together, while two of my daughters board one headed in the opposite direction. It’s the mixed emotions that come from returning to a city where I am known, and then leaving it behind again. And it’s the long journey through airports, planes, buses, ferries, ferry terminals and roads that tax my now-disabled brain and eyes.

It’s good to be home. It’s not so good to come out of the grocery store on the first day back to discover a flat tire on the car.

As I wrote in my last post, I’ve come through a hard season, and though I feel like I’m emerging from the darkest parts of it, and though a week of hanging out with my family and listening to great music under the trees at the Winnipeg Folk Festival was a soothing balm to my soul, I can’t say that I’ve found my way fully into the sunshine. Life still feels challenging and there’s a belligerent child in me that wants to shake an angry fist at the universe for sending a flat tire instead of ease.

This morning, I was scrolling on social media, knowing full well that it wasn’t the best thing to be doing when I was already feeling low, but it was too hard to find the will power needed to make a better choice.

Fortunately, there are good people sharing wise and meaningful things on social media and I found one of them in my zoned-out scrolling.

Nick Offerman shared this poem by Wendell Berry, and, as though a flashlight had been flicked on in a dark cave, something new emerged from the shadows. I am SO grateful for writers, artists, musicians, and poets who lend us their insights for moments when we lack our own.

The Sycamore
by Wendell Berry

In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in that has not harmed it.
There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

I read it and re-read it, and then listened to Nick read it, and this line, especially, landed just where I needed it to land...

“There is no year it has flourished in that has not harmed it.”

Though the poem is about a tree, it feels like that line could be written about my life. Probably about ALL of our lives.

There is no year I have flourished in that has not harmed me.

There is no season that comes with only sunshine. There is no season in which ease is the only story. There is no period in any of our lives when we get to feel like we have arrived, or that we’ve triumphed over darkness. There is no period when the only story is that we’re “living our best lives”.

There is no such thing as a one-way street to a good life. There are bumps and curves and dead-ends and detours and washed-out roads... and in between there are smooth patches and glorious vistas. There is light and there is shadow and there is every shade of grey.

When I stop to listen to that belligerent child in me who’s shaking her fist at the flat tire, I remember that the most immature part of me – the part that has been influenced by the lies of capitalism (and, especially, its foot soldier, the “wellness” industry) – wants to believe that I have earned the right to ease and sunshine. She wants to believe in success and triumph and mastery – especially if she works hard enough and does all the things the influencers tell her will lead to a good life.

But to be truly human is to live a non-linear, non-binary life. Life is beautiful, and life is messy. Life is complicated, life is remarkable, and life is disappointing sometimes.

We never get a one-way ticket to ease, no matter how much we invest in the ticket.

Like the tree, we get year after year in which we experience both flourishing AND harm.

It sounds so obvious, doesn’t it? And yet, sometimes we need the reminder.

To be truly human is to fumble through, to survive the “nails, hacks and lightning”, to heal over the “gnarls of our history”, and to “gather all accidents into our purpose.”

To be truly human is to hold both the grief AND the joy, the flourishing AND the harm, the flat tire AND the kindness of the local mechanic who fixed it, the challenge of a disability AND the joy of spending time with my daughters.

It’s a lesson you would think I had learned already, given the fact that it’s what’s at the heart of the program I created nearly ten years ago, How to Hold Space – Foundation Program, but I’m human and therefore I keep needing reminders of it.

Today, after reading Wendell Berry’s poem, I went to visit a tree that, like the Sycamore, reminds me how to stay human, and how to survive years in which I both flourish AND suffer harm. She’s beautiful, strong, and bent in a couple of places where life harmed her. I put my hand on her trunk and I let myself be held in her quiet strength for awhile. (She’s in the photo above.)

And then I took pictures of wildflowers, moss and ghost pipes to remind myself how beautiful the world still is.

On the way home, I listened to Jacob Brodovsky (a new discovery at the Folk Festival) sing his wisdom...

“Some years are winters
Some winters are hard...
It will never be easy
The going stays tough
Some years are winters
surviving’s enough.”

Want to grow your capacity for holding both the shadow and the light, the flourishing and the harm? Registration is open for How to Hold Space - Foundation Program.

Want to understand people better? Especially if you’re a leader of those people? Join us for the next module of Become a Grounded Guide.

Want to spend time with me in person? Check out my workshops in Europe in the Fall.

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