Nature Wrote the First Book

All Our Stories are a Variation on Her Theme

Last spring, a catastrophe happened in my garden. After a couple of years of the worst drought on record, the tallest tree in my garden, a gum with two trunks, had its larger trunk fall. Some thirty metres of tree, complete with installed nesting boxes crashed to the ground.

I hadn’t seen the toll of the sorrowful burdens it had been carrying: the impact of drought and age and rot on its heartwood. The pillar had certainly been scourged, but had carried its crosses with dignity, up to the last, when, just for a moment, it felt forsaken by its structural integrity and let go.

There was considerable collateral damage: it landed on my home orchard, snapping fruit trees off at the ground, and destroying its bird-netted enclosure beyond repair. Being an insurance job meant many delays in the repair work, and I walked past the carnage many times, heartbroken.

The fallen trunk, silent, abandoned, dead, a symbol of death and grief. A reminder that of our own mortality; a reminder of the crucified body of Jesus on his archetypal journey through the stages of human life. Broken and forsaken among the crushed hopes of fruit trees that had been about to send out fruitful spring shoots. Broken and dead, but watched over by its twin trunk, standing sentinel and still alive, reaching up into the sky.

“When the tree falls, the garden remains.”

One day, my silent grief at the devastation stilled. My eyes saw the fallen tree, but my heart’s ears heard words. “When the tree falls, the garden remains.” I blinked. My field of vision expanded: I saw the garden. I saw fruit trees sending indomitable shoots to meet the sun. Admittedly, they were getting tangled in the wrecked bird-netting, but alive.

“When the tree falls, the garden remains.”

Birds twittered. The sun warmed my back. The garden was unmistakably still present.

Some months later, after the debris had been cleared and the orchard was safe again under fresh netting, I saw the resurrection happening in front of my eyes. The lost trunk had broken off about a metre above the ground. It was sending out new shoots.

Nature wrote the first book.

Resurrection: the cycle of life. Happening in Nature right now. Because Nature wrote the first book. All our stories are just a variation on her theme.