I let my heart be lifted by the abundance all around me.
Today is a beautiful day. My daughter and I planted a young Willow Tree out by Donnie’s resting place. I have been babying this tree for over a year. It was time to plant her where she can grow and have a great purpose.
THE STORY of the WILLOW Tree
In the spring of 2008 Donnie and I went to a nursery looking for plants. I spotted a poor little Willow barely hanging on. The owner of the nursery said he had named her Charlie Brown. She had been damaged by a severe frost the winter prior, so the price was low because nobody wanted that tree, he said. She wasn’t pretty enough. I wanted her! We of course hadn’t gone there for that. But we came home with a Willow Tree.
Later that year I flew down to Texas to be with my father who was ill and I was gone several weeks. After he passed away, I returned home to see that the Willow had all but died. Heartbroken, we dug up the tree. But I kept a branch and hoping the tree would start anew, I planted the branch and babied it until surely enough, it began to grow. About a year later we replanted the tree which is now over forty feet tall.
When I realized I was going to have to move I took a branch and planted it, prayed over it and nurtured it and brought it here where the small tree has flourished. Today we planted the tree.
That tree represents abundance which never dies. It can always be rejuvenated. Just as it seems hopeless, there is new life just waiting to be planted again so it can grow – the way the tree found a whole new life and new meaning and purpose as well.
My life is like that tree also. I have been replanted and am beginning to flourish again.
The planting of that tree was the last thing I needed to do that would complete a process I felt I needed to complete.
Donnie and I were officially engaged on Easter weekend so this is fitting. It was the weekend he gave me my ring in 1987.
New beginnings.
It was just my daughter and I and the weather has been perfect. We also took the dogs with us.
Abundance is rarely measured in money. Abundance is in our children’s faces, in the faces of our pets, in the Hawks gliding overhead, and in the sunshine. It is in the music we enjoy and in the pleasant life we have been granted. Like that tree, we guard and share sacred stories. We share our tears and we share our joys. The tree grieved when I was gone but is flourishing now and provides abundance just by being that tree. Without the grief part of the story, the story wouldn’t be the same. We can take that which hurts us and turn it around, so that our stories help others flourish. Our life can be cut down to one small branch, but from that one branch magnificence can spring forth, and create new stories.
Today, I let my heart be lifted.
More abundance waits. All it needs is a little hope and faith.
I let my heart be lifted by the abundance all around me.
Susan G. Cline 