Putting down roots…

You can spend your whole life trying to put roots into the ground, strong, deep, roots that will stop you tumbling over in the wind, crashing to the ground with that creak of the “Timberrrrrr!” that we all know from countless television shows where nobody or somebody is or isn’t under the tree as it falls.

Putting out root after root, tiny filament growing from tiny filament, thickening and filling, growing longer, going deeper, until one day you feel so firmly rooted that nothing, no wind or storm, can make you topple ever and you stand in your landscape tall, proud, and strong, and look around you. “Look at me, look at me. See what a strong tree I have become.”

And you are.

For years you are.

And then one day you feel a change. Not in yourself, but in the land around you, slight at first, a trembling in the soil but growing stronger all the time. The soil is becoming thin; it blows away as dust upon the wind and, trickling through your roots, falls away and is gone for ever leaving behind a vacuum where once there was rich earth. The ground, once firm, sags; and the rain that always drained away before stays, clogging your roots and making you shiver with its puddle touch.

It is this that makes you change.

Now, you bend in the wind almost to a keel. Now, the slightest breeze causes fear where once there was only courage. And now - you have begun to wither. You want to get up and move, go somewhere else and start again, put down new roots, try to grow afresh. But you are a tree; your roots have gone too deep. They’ve kept you upright all these years but now they hold you fast, have started to suck you down into the hole that has opened beneath you and in your wooden hearted centre you know that it is only a question of time before there’s nothing left, not a leaf, or a branch, or an intertwined root. Not even a stump to mark that singular spot where you once grew.

Just an empty space where once there was a tree.