The Bigger Picture

I was sitting outside today just smoking a cigarette and looking at this tree that has been on my front lawn since I was born.

Through the years it had grown into a monstrous giant looming high into the blue of the midday sky.

Up until a few years ago it was covered in a lush blanket of emerald ivy that hung down in twisted blankets from the branches high above. With each year that passed, the tree grew the ivy grew with it.

Beneath the covering of jaded speckled leaves; thick ropes of vines began to encircle the tree strangling it. Each new spring would reveal a part of the tree that had been choked of life from the beautiful ivy that covered it.

My parents decided that the ivy had to go.

It took a long time of pulling away at the layers of leaves and chopping away at the monstrous vines that lay beneath it all. After many months the ivy with no source of nutrients from its severed vines began to shrivel up and fall away until nothing but the skeleton of it’s former self was left.

Regardless of the strangle hold that it had been in for so long...the tree still grew.

Every day it would still reach up to kiss the sunshine in the afternoon sky.
Even when parts of itself were dried and lifeless, it never stopped fighting for the parts of itself that still lived.

Today, as I sat outside I watched a little gray squirrel scurry through the dead branches and tangle of dried vines that still remain; cautiously he made his way across the tree until he reached a little branch that had sprouted from the dead growth.

On that branch was a little acorn that the squirrel quickly grabbed and ran down the tree to bury in the grass below for winter storage.

I started thinking how nature in all its splendor and glory carries with it many of the same stories I carry with me in my own life. The struggles I have encountered, the things I have allowed to consume me.

With all that I have been through and gone through...no matter what I still kept moving forward.

I still carry with me my history.
I still carry with me my past.
The hurt still has a place in my heart.
The pain is still there.

The lashes that life has inflicted upon my spirit; the scars will always be there.

But yet much like the vines of the ivy it no longer has the power to slowly kill me. The remnants will stay with me forever more...but the force that threatens to choke the life from me in it’s subtle deceptive ways no longer does.

My wounds.
My experiences.
My strength.

Much like the little acorn, my pain now becomes a source of healing nourishment for those who have walked the paths of life I have traveled.

It becomes the hope for the next person who has suffered.
It becomes the message for the hopeless.

In rehab two years ago a man by the name of the “Rev” told me: