The Palm, the Willow, the Way Forward

When I was nine, I spent part of a summer with my paternal grandparents in South Carolina. My family's relationship with my father's family has always been complicated, so this trip was something of an anamoly in the firmament of my childhood. The experiment was a nearly unmitigated disaster; my grandmother and I fought like the pig-headed autocrats we both are inside. However, the pine forests of the Carolinas are beautiful, majestic, regal, and to this day I sometimes dream about how they smell and the quality of silence that's created by the muffling effect of years upon years of pine needles decomposing beneath your feet.

About halfway through the trip, my grandfather took me for a drive along the Carolina coast. This was 1993, as I recall, after Hurricane Andrew. There were palm trees along that drive that were growing crooked: gnarled and bent over and sticking out from the earth at a uniform impossible angle.

"Do you know why those trees are bent?" my grandfather asked me.

I shook my head.

"They bent in the hurricane's wind. They bent so that they would remain standing. The trees that didn't bend are gone now."

We spent the rest of the drive in silence. Even at nine, I knew what he was trying to tell me. And I was a little ashamed that he felt he had to impart this lesson to me, and I was little resentful that he wasn't trying to impart it to his wife instead, and I was about as thoughtful as a nine-year-old gets.

My grandfather died a few years ago; my grandmother is still alive in the Carolinas, and the last few times I've seen her, it's certainly seemed as if she's learned to bend in the wind.

The palm trees in the wind are the beginning of mystery. I am grateful to my grandfather, and the hurricane, and those trees, for giving me such a concrete lesson, but it's time to move on from the palm trees. The palms, you see, they bent in the wind so that they would survive. That's all. That's it. Acceptance so that survival.

I've been having trouble bending to the winds lately. I've been having trouble accepting merely to survive. My horizon is broadened, and mere survival seems small. I feel buffeted at every turn, everything and everyone seems hell-bent on knocking me over and leaving me small and broken on the ground. Events, yes, but also people. From elections to relationships, I cannot bend the way I ought. I have no acceptance because acceptance feels like defeat. I don't want to succumb; I want to thrive. I don't want to be a solitary palm tree, isolated and broken and just hanging on. I want so much more than that.

A few days ago, I randomly stumbled on a parable that I can no longer place, but it showed me where to go, how to continue to bend to the winds.

The willow shoot bends in the wind until it is a forest that can break the wind.

Time to grow into a forest.