We have probably spent too long looking at life as if it were a vast river, sighing over how brief it is. That way of talking has been worn smooth by repetition. Maybe it is gentler, and truer, to make life smaller—to see it as a small, lovely tree.
At first, a little tree hardly looks like much at all, almost like a bare branch stuck into the ground. Then it takes in sunlight, takes in water, and slowly, very slowly, grows taller and wider until it becomes a great tree. Creatures come to live within it. They settle there, grow there, and pass their days in warmth and happiness. They do not worry about the sky collapsing, because the tall tree bears the weight for them. And the tree itself does not grieve over having no one to carry it.
After all, it was once tiny too—so tiny that all it knew was how to look for its father and mother. Back then, it never feared the sky falling either, because its parents held up the whole world above it.
What makes a little tree so lovable at the beginning is the way it lives without care, playing with other little trees. They bump branches into one another, jostling and tumbling about, and when one gets hurt it cries out for its parents: “Dad, Mom, I’m hurt.” Then the two great trees bend down and soothe it, brushing a rough but tender kiss against the little one’s cheek. Those parent trees light the first spark of life in the small tree—a spark full of energy, full of feeling, and full of the dim, innocent wonder of childhood.
But the weather does not stay kind forever. The sky changes without warning, and one day a mountain fire rises. Father and mother are gone. The little tree remains, while its companions have all gone elsewhere.
“Dad, Mom, I’m cold.”
But now, when it calls, no soft kiss comes, no embrace answers. “Dad, Mom.” “Dad, Mom...” At last the tender young voice falls silent. The whole world seems to go still with it, and the air fills with something heavy—oppression, tension, sorrow.
And yet this is where the little tree is lovable in another way: the spark inside it does not go out.
It imagines that beyond the sea, beyond the mountains, perhaps—just perhaps—there is another little tree somewhere, also crying for its parents. Father and mother have not truly vanished. They remain inside the little tree, always there, always there, forever and ever.
And when, one day, a new little tree calls it “Dad” and “Mom,” it answers with that same weathered, rough, gentle kiss, leaving warmth on the child’s cheek. Then the new little trees do not need to fear the sky falling, because someone is holding up an entire world for them, carrying everything, everything.