☀️ Staying Power #177: "Mother Tree"

Because I'm grateful

Published on occasional Sundays, Staying Power is one of the newsletters of The Raft, the online community of author Phyllis Cole-Dai. We Rafters ride the river of life buoyed by music, poetry, and other arts, along with open spirituality. Most everything here is free, but patrons (paid subscribers) get some special perks as a gesture of gratitude.

I want to thank you and every other Rafter for the dear messages I’ve received from you since the death of my mother on October 12. You’ve buoyed me from every direction.

Please know that I am well. Not yet home—another ten days or so yet—but feeling more rested and floating on a sea of good will.

Rafter Jenny R. recently sent me the following excerpt from Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelmen. A caring friend had shared this passage with Jenny after her own mom had transitioned:

Nature often offers metaphors more elegant than any we can manufacture. In the redwood ecosystem all seeds are contained in pods called burls, tough brown clumps that grow where the mother tree's trunk and root system meet. When the mother tree is logged, blown over, or destroyed by fire the trauma stimulates the burls' growth hormones. The seeds release, and trees sprout around her, creating the circle of daughters. The daughter trees grow by absorbing the sunlight their mother cedes to them when she dies. And they get the moisture and nutrients they need from their mother's root system, which remains intact even after her leaves die. Although the daughters exist independently of their mother above ground, they continue to draw sustenance from her underneath.

I am fooling myself when I say my mother exists now only in the photograph on my bulletin board, or in the outline of my hand, or in the armful of memories I still hold tight. She lives on beneath everything I do. Her presence influenced who I was, and her absence influences who I am. Our lives are shaped as much by those who leave us as they are by those who stay. Loss is our legacy. Insight is our gift. Memory is our guide.

When I first read these words, I was instantly reminded of “Mother Tree,” a poem I wrote and first shared with you in May 2023. Sometime after posting that poem, I affixed a revision of it to a piece of birch bark that I’d scavenged from the North Woods of Minnesota, framed it, and gifted it to a friend. (See image above.)

Now, on the other side of Mom’s passage from this life, I’m reading “Mother Tree” with new eyes.

I offer this poem to you again today to say thank you, thank you, thank you for companioning me so tenderly in this world. “Don’t think us separate / because we stand apart.”

The Gentle Nudge

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