Do Not Release Your Hold

It is a sort source of constant wonder how trees seem to take the measure of the climate and make of their existence a working paper on life. Along some parts of the coast where there is a steady wind from the sea, there is a general recognition of the fact that it is extremely difficult for trees to grow tall and straight against the sky. Yet they do. They bend with the wind and ride out every storm, yielding only enough to guarantee themselves against destruction. It is a very fine art, this bending with the wind and keeping on.

Of course, the winds leave their mark. The trees are not upright as if they have never known the relentless pressure of many winds through many days. One sees, sometimes, trees that have grown in a community of trees where there is mass protection of many trunks for those not on the outer rim. Such trees have flattened tops. The trunks may be tall and straight, gaining every available inch of shelter all the way up, until at last there is the point where the topmost branch feels the pull of the sun and the sky to go its way alone. Here there is no single branch. Doubtless many have tried, but in the process have been snapped off, leaving their bleeding stumps as a mute testimony to heroic worth.

The tree soon learns its lesson: within the resources available to it, a little canopy of branches inch their way above the protecting wall of outer tree of other trees. They are young and supple, they bend with the wind, always sustained by the sturdy growth from which they have come. Unless the wind is able to suffer them from the main body of the tree, their continued growth is guaranteed. The tree seems to say to the branches, “Bend with the wind but do not release your hold, and you can ride out any storm.” To the trees that did not learn how to bend with the wind but preferred rather to remain straight and defiant against the Sky and are now dead and rotting in the earth, it was a great moment when they came crashing to the ground with a certain sense of triumph: “Ah, it took the concentrated violence of all the winds of heaven to bring me low. Such is the measure of my strength and my power.”

There is a strange, naked glory in the majesty of so grand a homecoming. All through the life of man on the planet, there have been sun-crowned men like that, and around them movements for the healing of the nations have arisen. And yet man, in the mass, has continued to survive because he has learned to bend with the wind.

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. pages 53-54
Originally published in Deep is the Hunger)

It feels so appropriate to choose this selection for the day of the Vernal Equinox. We’ll gather at the congregation later today and read this reflection on trees. We’ll do a little snake dance in and out of a circle. And then we’ll go outside to appreciate the warmer weather and to plant seeds in little cups to take home. It will be simple and flexible, and I hope our faith, and especially our trust in one another, will allow us the strength to meet the challenges of this moment.