We Live in a Needful World
Each of us has something to offer
Outside my window, there is a bare tree. In fact, there are several trees, the garden thick full with firs and leaves, trees who kept their warmth during winter. But there is this tree, this single tree — I do not know it’s name — whose branch spires I see from my bed each morning, whose shadowy limbs I watch climb into the night.
Then there are the birds. This morning, a blue tit, followed my another, land on a thin top branch, sending a shiver down. There’s something in the bird’s movement, its skittish head looking this way and that, or perhaps I’ve watched these birds for long enough to know, they will not stay for long. One bird hops to another branch, the second follows. The bird flies off, the other follows. The tree, bare, once again.
Later this morning, a single magpie wanders the middling branches, harking to the hidden orchestra of birds. She stays a while, hopping and harking, before she, too, continues on her way.
Like an airport, the tree is a transitory place — a temporary home to life. The tree, too, is changing. Leaves, I know, are beginning to form, readying themselves for the first signs of spring. The tree will become more bountiful soon to host all the creatures I’ve watched live in this tree each spring, each summer — bees and birds, squirrels and so many beings I know by only by sight, not name.
But I am touched, now, by the sturdy frailty of this tree — even in its most skeletal form, as it prepares for its own becoming, it offers itself as a home. The tree doesn’t say no, rejecting itself to life, because it isn’t yet worthy or ready or has so little to give. Even in its winter, its stark aloneness, branches like bones against the sky, the tree knows it is needed and wanted, offering itself as it can.
Something, the tree says, I can offer something.
✼ Reflection Prompts ✼
Who are you a home to in your own bareness and becoming?
This week, pay attention to interdependence - notice, who and what needs each other? What wouldn’t be possible without the presence of another?
How are you holding yourself back from the good you can offer the world? (We need you!)
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With love,
