It’s been a while since I sat down and wrote in my blog. It’s not because I was lazy or distracted, although that might have been part of the reason, it is just hard sometimes for me to find a topic that feels right. I have started multiple pieces only to have them end mid-sentence with no place to go. For me, if the topic is right, the piece finds its own ending.

I just returned from a hike with my grandchildren, Jackson and Adela. We had chosen one of our favorite trails, whose location we keep secret. If we didn’t, the solitude it offers would be diminished by the hordes of people it might attract, the crunch of pine needles beneath our feet would be replaced with the sound of a hundred other feet. For us the two-mile loop trail offers majestic lake views on our left and beautiful stands of hardwoods, evergreens and cypress groves on our right, and all along the trail, the solitude that comes with the deep green forest. As we follow the trail, it meanders past several rock and forest formations which my grandchildren have taken the effort to name. Queens Chair and King’s chair, one formed from a long ago fallen tree stump and the other from a perfectly formed boulder, Hotel Rock, a boulder big enough to scale as they always do, the Black Lagoon and Spit Bridge, don’t even ask but the sign says slippery when wet, are just a few of the names they have chosen. But of the many interesting formations are two trees, The Knotted Tree and the Resilient Tree.

The Knotted Tree is a cypress that at some time in its growth cycle, through an act of nature, found itself forced to grow around itself with the result being this tree that appears tied in a knot. The Resilient Tree faced a similar problem. At some point it had been blown down, likely by a heavy storm. Lying on the ground, stretched across the trail, with its roots turned up to the sky, it decided to survive. The tree began to grow upward from its roots at one end and the end of the trunk from the other. At one point, though recently trimmed to clear the trail, it had actually shot out a new limb that crossed the trail above its fallen trunk. It was upon passing these two examples of survival and adaptation, that the inspiration for this piece sprung forth.

We are currently in an unprecedented period of history. There is enough divisiveness and political rhetoric to grind even the most optimistic of us to despair. We are facing factions on both sides that see our way of life at peril if the other side wins. In this setting, it is too easy to just give up or at the very least give in. When I looked at those two trees today, I saw a metaphor for life. We can be knocked down. We can even choose to give up, but that is not what it means to live. We as humans have an incredible ability to adapt to new situations, to rebound from failure, to pick our way through the maze of issues, to continue to find a way forward. It is clique to say that every cloud has a silver lining, because sometimes they just don’t, but to give up is to choose not to live. Just like both of those trees, we can find a way to survive and even to thrive no matter what the storm that might try to shake us to our core.

Come this November we will be asked to voice our opinion as a nation, and we will do that with our vote. If we are to give into our fears, it we find ourselves pushed to the brink of cynicism, to a point where we decide to give up our right to vote, then we will be forced to live with the outcome regardless of our beliefs. If we choose instead to vote our conscience, then no matter the outcome, our voice will at least have been heard. Then like those two trees that, by persistence and resilience, found a way to survive, we too may find a way to adapt and even to thrive.