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It’s pretty windy. I kinda had a reflecting moment yesterday. Hubby was marveling over the miracle of how the tops of the trees were swaying so much with the wind and how they didn’t break. I was struck with how much like life trees are.

Trees, have a remarkable ability to withstand so very much. Wind, snow, rain, drought they always have a way of bouncing back.  They may lose a branch, but the tree keeps growing. Even if most of the tree falls, if left alone, the tree itself keeps growing and over the years it will grow to the point you may never realize at one time it looked as if the tree’s life was over.

When I was a kid, the woods were my solace. My safe haven. Over my course of hikes in the woods around my childhood home I had found a tree that quickly became my favorite. At one point in it’s younger days it had fallen out over a rocky ledge. Instead of dying, the tree kept growing, it grew straight out across the rocks then after about 4 feet of growing out it turned and started growing straight up… you could see the scars from where it had broken but it had overcame it and grew up into a beautiful tree.

I loved going there and sitting on the tree and just enjoying being alone in the woods.

Life is much like that tree, we all have scars people can see and yes, some they cannot see. We have all had times where things didn’t go right in our lives, but we continue to grow, much as that tree did. The scars of bad things that happened to this tree weren’t ugly, they were beautiful reminders that it had overcome a great obstacle to become a what it was, a beautiful part of nature.

We can learn a lot from nature’s lessons of life, survival, and adaptation. We don’t have to see a person’s scars as a negative. We only have to look beyond and realize that for every scar there is a triumph over adversity. We all can heal and continue to grow. Bad things do not have to mean the end of growth and beauty.