“Once there was a tree and she loved a little boy and every day the boy would come and would gather her leaves and make them into crowns and play king of the forest.” Those words were the beginning of my demise today while substituting for a class. I started reading and maybe it was the rhythm of the story, or the broken manner of its tone, but I cried. Not your beautiful, misty-eyed cry – No, it was a bumbling, runny-nosed, whining sob session. I could barely get through the book! Although I tried my hardest to calm myself down, something in the story made me putty. I couldn’t find my center.
Perhaps it was the simplicity of the story – it is, in the end, a children’s story, but the timelessness of its message just made the synapses in my brain fire away at all that’s terrible, unfair and parasitic about humanity. This is what at the end of the day makes me write. The hope that somehow words can transform, ring a bell to not only my own ego, but to some other unwitting, cyber-passerby.
Check the story out here – and you’ve been warned, place a box of tissues nearby: https://walnutumc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/239064999-The-Giving-Tree.pdf