Is it natural?

I went for a walk this morning with my husband and our dog, as is our Sunday morning custom. We found ourselves a 10 minute drive from our home, and after about 20 minutes in the middle of field with beautiful vistas of a fresh March spring morning, extending miles and miles with the distant shadows of the Yorkshire hills and valleys in two directions.

It was beautiful and restorative, and refreshing and uplifting. 

Wow.

I breathed deep.

We followed the path which then began to run along the edge of the field. Woodland was on the other side of the field, and suddenly it was as if I heard a silent scream; a huge foreboding tree stood with one of its massive branches wrenched from its trunk, broken, dismembered, harshly jutting out with it’s insides exposed.

It was disturbing.

It was natural.

It was clear that the branch’s core was rotten; a hollow black sickened inner core had finally forced the branch to break and fall to the ground.

This tree that looks like it has been there forever. Certainly it’s lived longer than anyone currently alive; I imagined the world as it could have been when that first seed took root in that part of our world; the modes of transport that were used, the day to day lives of the humans living nearby, the landscape, the wildlife, the climate…. That tree has seen it all. 

And then suddenly, something that we take for granted because it’s just always been there, suddenly one day, it isn’t, because unbeknown to us, it was rotten on the inside. Invisible to our eyes, it was getting weaker and weaker, and we carried on not noticing, until it was too late, until the branch finally was wrenched from the tree’s trunk and it was is if I could hear the screams of that poor tree standing so hopelessly with its scorched dead limb lying next to it.

But of course, that’s nature, isn’t it? Why would I think that the tree’s branch should have not been rotten on the inside? Why do we / I always want to try to fix things? If the branch didn’t fall, it wouldn’t decompose and enrich the surrounding earth, or provide shelter for wildlife and bugs… why does the image disturb me so much of the grand majestic tree with it’s lower limb so violently removed from its core?

I looked at the tree again. I saw its stoic stance, still upright, still alive, fresh new green shoots emerging from all its other branches. I learned a new lesson from this tree this morning:

To accept a new reality and still be determined to flourish.