Bent But Not Destroyed

A few years ago Kathy and I were walking a familiar trail through a woods at Cranbrook near our home in Detroit when my eyes were caught by something unusual on a tree I had passed a dozen times.  The tree was an ancient cottonwood, so big around that it would have taken three people holding hands to reach around it.  Reaching for light in the dense growth, the tree had grown tall and straight, its first branches reaching out so high above us we had to hold on to keep our balance when we looked up at it.  A nearby tree had fallen against the trunk years earlier, maybe decades, and scraped a five foot swath of bark from the old cottonwood, ten feet above the ground.  Over the years, decay and healing had battled each other as the cambium had tried to grow over the wound, and a hollow had formed.  The hollow prevented complete healing, because the new cambium and bark had nothing to hold on to.  In its confusion, the tree began to send roots down, and a profusion of roots cascaded from the wound.  Finding no water, they eventually grew bark, but never leaves.

Bill’s eloquent comment on yesterday’s blog gives me an opportunity to point out something that I noticed when I took the photos here.

When I asked Riet Schumack if I could photograph the plan of the project they were working on, she adeptly slid Johannes’s drawing under a convenient branch oddly protruding down from the trunk of their own ancient cottonwood.

I had recognized that oddly downward-pointing branch immediately.  And I had immediately thought how providential it was that it would be here to hold Johannes’s drawing of “Spiral Bench Around Cottonwood Mother Tree”

Years ago something had caused a wound in the side of this tree, this mother tree.  And as in Cranbrook, in the attempt to heal, it had sent out a root, and that root, finding no water had grown bark, but never any leaves.  It had hung there, apparently useless, foolish limb, for years.  Silly root, six feet above any water!

And now, the silly root has found its source of life in the spirit and labor of Riet and Mark, Billie and Bill, Johannes and Thomas and the Brightmoor neighbors and kids from the nearby school.  There it is, the perfectly located clip, don’t you know, holding up that vision, that source of growing hope.  I am often moved, when something like this happens, when some long-ago seemingly insignificant event or even mistake turns out to have been God all along, planning way ahead for this act of love today.  How He was loving me all along, all those years.  And that makes me think of the Hopkins poem to which Bill referred:

7. God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins

  THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.        

  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;    

  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil     

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod*?         

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;            

  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;              

  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil       

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.          

And for all this, nature is never spent;    

  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;             

And though the last lights off the black West went          

  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— 

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent    

  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

* “reck his rod” is interpreted as follow his leadership, his scepter.

Bright wings indeed.  Spinging forth indeed.  Bent but not destroyed.  Spirals, indeed.  Yes, indeed.  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.