I took this photo of a tree branch pinioned into a piece of metal fence.
It was left on the floor of a house I was doing construction in, and I obviously found it very striking.
The branch appears to have been pierced – as if on a torture rack – by the metal.
It looks excruciating, like a crucifixion, the metal of the fence puncturing and driving clean through the flesh of the tree.
But…
there’s only one way that this could have happened.
The tree branch – certainly because, for some reason of space and light, it had nowhere else to grow – grew around the fence. Forced up against it, and compelled to grow taller and wider, it incorporated the metal into itself. And now there really would be no way of removing the metal without digging deep into the flesh of the tree branch, and possibly killing it.
What of the ‘steel fences’ in our lives – personal and cultural cages of conformity, heartbreaks, tragedies, traumas – which we’re forced up against? Maybe we were forced to grow into them, or through them, and to even incorporate them – still alien – in order to continue on… And now they’re deeply deeply embedded, as though part of us.
And, you know, the tree branch kept growing, right?
Impetuously and irresistibly it kept reaching,
leaves and seeds unfailingly sprouting and falling each season,
ever unraveling its inimitable core reason,
ever liberating its essential being.
And so it grows…
And so it grows…
