That’s just the way she grows

Have you ever come into crossing with a gathering of trees or a small forest and noticed anything peculiar, or especially out of the ordinary? I have.

Not one forest is the same, and they are by far anything close to being perfect. This being said, I suppose it wouldn’t be too out of the ordinary to notice something out of the ordinary. But for me, I always seem to notice a particular type of tree every time.

Big forests are, without saying, one of the most magical places one can find themselves. But I’ve taken a new liking to the much smaller, more intimate ones. When there aren’t as many trees all bunched up together it’s easier for me to observe the nature of the trees as individuals as well as part of a community. This one thing I always happened to notice is that it seemed as though every small grouping of trees had one to a few trees that were growing the wrong way. Unlike their fellow community members that grew straight up and down, the select few would grow sideways and vertical.

All the other trees stood tall and together, reaching straight up towards the sun just as trees were designed to do. But, these adventurists would grow left and right, diagonally and crooked, against the “code” of the way a tree should grow.

Yet, nonetheless, their leaves still found their way to the sunshine. They still withstood the same winds and rains, and turned red and gold in the fall just the same.

In a way, I’ve always seen a little bit of myself in these “eclectic growers”. They don’t take the path most taken and instead grow into a swirly-quirky and sturdy life force. Maybe they decided to take a different path, or maybe that just what they resorted to with whatever fate had dealt them.

Maybe, as these trees matured, growing straight up wasn’t always an option, facing obstacles within the “normal” path. The branches instead would curl in resilience and find a way to make it work in some relentless persistence to survive. They simply do not give up.

And so, if I were a tree I guess I would be one of those guys. Sometimes things can stand in the way of what we think we are supposed to be doing. Obstacles can present themselves right in the middle of what we were doing. But at the end of the day, growing a little sideways doesn’t hurt, and it certainly doesn’t mean we still aren’t going to reach the top.

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