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With loss comes grieving. There are many stages of grieving and this story aims to help you understand some of these and the importance of acceptance before we feel able to move on.

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Once upon a time, a little goblin sat upon a tree trunk stump. He was waiting for a friend, but as he did so he began to wonder about the great tree that had once stood here, but which was now no more than a stump. It had been felled many years ago and yet, as he sat on it, it was as if it was still alive, for it began to share with him a little of it’s life.

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“I was a female tree,” she said. “I lived my life here on earth for many centuries. However, then one day, they came along and felled me, for I was no longer useful or fitted into the plans the new owners had for the land. Therefore, I had to go and so I was chopped down. However, their plans came to naught and this land was never developed.

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And so, I sit here, a tiny part of who I once was, but still alive and wanting to share with you or anyone who has time, a little of my story, my life, and all I witnessed as a great and grand oak tree that grew and thrived through many generations. Most people do not have the time to listen to my tales. Yet I want to share them and am eager to do so, but I await one who has more than a few minutes to give me. Do you?” the tree asked.

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“I do indeed,” said the goblin, “for I have been cast out from my kingdom and have nowhere else to go except here. I was drawn to you, for in you I sensed a great tale. So, I seem to have all the time in the world at the moment and would be delighted to hear something other than my woes and worries. Do please begin. Share with me whatever it is you most desire sharing today.”

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At that precise moment a shepherd and one of his sheep came across the tree and the goblin bid them both a good day. “Do you know that this tree still talks, even though it was dead and past its best?” asked the goblin to the shepherd and the sheep.

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“I do indeed,” replied the shepherd. “This is why we have come here today, to listen again to the tales she has been sharing with us for many a year. She has had a great life and although now she is little noticed, she still has much to share with the world.

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For now she has wisdom, the wisdom that can only ever come with years. This tree grew grander and grander because each year she witnessed things that were new, fresh and different. Each time something new came near her and brushed against her, she begged them to sit for a while and share their lives with her so that she might not be lonely, but also because she was eager to learn as much as she could about the world beyond her reach.

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For she had no legs, like the other creatures who came to and fro day after day. Therefore, she was never able to leave this wood and the ground she was embedded in. However, she had been given ears and eyes and a mind that was like a sponge, eager and often desperate to soak up something new and wonderful into her being. So, although she couldn’t escape, she could learn about the world beyond her. As she met new and often interesting animals and people every day, her world grew ever bigger, wider, deeper and more three dimensional and substantial, as if enriched by carpets of flowers and colours around her.

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As each new stranger informed her life, each left behind a golden nugget of wisdom or understanding or knowledge, which helped her grow in all ways in her life. As each passing stranger left, she embraced the nugget that they had left behind and ruminated and thought upon it, often for many days and sometimes even weeks. On some days she had so many passing visitors that she almost overlooked some of the gifts which they had brought and, on those days, she had to make sure that she recorded their visit in some way so that she could return later to her storehouse of treasures when she had more time.

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As a baby tree, she had mourned deeply that God had not given her legs with which to travel. For many years, in her teens, she was sad, depressed and melancholic, realising that this place where she was planted, would be the only place that she would ever see. How she had longed to be away from and free of this damnable place where there were no new views or sights. Even with her eyes shut, she could draw an accurate map of almost everything in her home; who was where, how tall or wide they were and where the leaves fell and the trees that had been cut for lumbar. She knew it all.

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At least she had the seasons of life, and could enjoy the ever-changing nature of them. At least then things changed and her vista changed too. Of that she was eternally grateful. But still, how she longed for legs!”

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“How did you get over your regrets and sadness’s about having no legs?” they all asked together.

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“I remember the day well,” she cried. “It was the day when the darkness cleared and I stepped into a new light, the light of truth. For so many years I had deceived myself into believing that one day I would travel, see the world and be free of this place and this small world I was contained within. However, on this day, a man came walking up to me and said the following:-

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“Now tree, we need to talk. You have been deceiving yourself for too long and I need to give you some plain speaking. You are a tree. In addition, you are an oak tree; not a beech or a maple or a willow but an oak. Nothing, absolutely nothing, ever, is going to alter that. Do you understand? It doesn’t matter how many times you holler and scream and complain about being an oak tree, an oak tree you will remain.

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Now you have a number of options. Firstly, you can continue to despair and to lie to yourself, filling yourself with false hopes and dreams of running away and being different. That might bring you comfort for a while, but you would be in a state of denial about who you are and what you are capable of being and doing in this life. So that is one option.

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Another option is to give up and die a slow death, feeling defeated and depressed and believing that a life without legs is a life not worth living. Each day your world will become smaller and smaller, because you will no longer have any interest in anyone or anything. However, still you will have to wait until either you die or someone comes along and fells you. However, even then, a little bit of who you once were will remain.

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You could ask another to bring poison and pour it lavishly upon your roots, so that you more quickly wither and die. However, very few people will be prepared to prematurely end the life of a tree, which when they look upon you, see a beautiful and magnificent specimen.

You can get angry and bitter and blame God himself for making you as a tree and limiting your life by not giving you what you had always secretly desired, legs. However, all that anger and bitterness will get into your trunk and branches and begin to eat away at you and cause much pain and sorrow. You could then continue to remain depressed and melancholic and withdraw even further from those all around you. All of these are options.

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Or there are these options, each of which revolve around truth. The others all grow out of untruths of who you are or were made to be and your purpose, meaning and future. All the next options revolve around embracing the truth of who you are.

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Firstly, you have no legs, for you are a tree. It doesn’t matter what you do or say or think, nothing is going to change that unalterable fact. Therefore, the first option is to accept who you are. Accept, that as a tree, you will never walk away from here. As a tree, you won’t be able to travel and see the whole world. As a tree, you will never be able to fly in a plane, until or unless, you are chopped up into tiny pieces and exported somewhere. However, by then you will be dead and unable to enjoy or appreciate where you are being taken.

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With accepting your limitations, there must be a time and period of grieving. Grieving for all you will never have, the places you will never go, all the people you will never meet and all the good things that might have come through those friendships and relationships. Once one accepts who one truly is and grieves for the things and person we can never be, one must then let go of those dreams, those pipe dreams, for they are never going to happen.

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However, the minute one becomes real with oneself and begins to let those pipe dreams drift away, like bubbles into the sky, you are once again at another crossroads. You can stay here, accepting and letting go, but eventually you will grow sad and empty again, for whilst you have let go of your unrealistic expectations, you have no new dreams or hopes to hold in their place. Weeds then begin to cover your trunk and tell you that now all you are good for is as a support for others to lean against. If you let these imposters take root near you, they will try and come to fool and convince you that this is now the only point of your life. So instead, once you have grieved for the dreams that could never be, you must straight away begin to dream new dreams.

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However, these new dreams are not dreams based on who you would like to be, but actually on who you are. A tree. All of a sudden, an excitingly wonderful world opens up before you. There is a breakthrough because, probably for the first time in your life, you can dream about all the possibilities that lay before you as a tree. Instead of any longer regretting who you are, you can begin to dream about being the very best oak tree that you can be. Once you have accepted who you are, you can stop looking outside of yourself, almost ashamed of exploring yourself too deeply, and begin to examine your bark and trunk and branches and leaves and all the life that you support and provide shelter and food for.

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You believed that you were nothing, when suddenly you realise that there are parts of you that have never been seen or discovered before. Once you accept the truth that trees do not have legs, you can begin to learn to love who you are and where you are.

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Then you begin to realise that if the mountain can’t move, people and things and insects and adventures always come to the mountain each and every day. Once one stops longing for and grieving all the things that aren’t and can’t be in our lives, then we can shift to begin to notice all the good things that are in our lives and surround us each and every day. We then become intimately acquainted with things, people, situations and circumstances right under our branches, which before we overlooked and ignored, as we were always focusing on things beyond our horizons. Instead, each day becomes full of new surprises and on days when it is quieter, we can enjoy simply being ourselves. Enjoying our beauty. Growing our roots more and more deeply into the ground in which we were planted.

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One day, as our roots penetrate the deepest that they have ever reached before, we discover an underground source of water that refreshes and restores us, whenever we need it and whenever we grow thirsty or dehydrated. Then we discover that it is in the world beneath our feet that the true treasures of life exist. We discover underground reservoirs within life and within ourselves. Any appeal those distant horizons once held have now paled into insignificance. For we know that they can offer nothing as breathtakingly wonderful as the treasures we have found within ourselves and where we have been planted.

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Then, incredibly, for the first time ever, we are so grateful that we were never given legs. For if we had, we would have probably spent our whole lives roaming the world, looking for something that was beneath and within us all the time. Eventually, we will be so grateful and appreciative that we were given the greatest of honours, of being an oak tree and every day will become a celebration of that truth.

So, little oak tree, you must decide. Will you continue to regret being who you were made to be and longing for things that are impossible? Or will you learn to accept, let go and then embrace all of your magnificence and beauty? That choice is now none other than yours.”

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“That was my greatest breakthrough moment,” the tree trunk explained. “From that moment on I knew that I was at rock bottom and could either die a long, lingering death or once again embrace the life that I had been given. It might not be the life I had dreamt of, but it was the one given to me. Instead of wishing I was different and lived somewhere else and hoping for impossibilities, all the untruths in my life, I came to embrace the truth of who I was. 

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That stranger was completely right. I grew into a magnificent and beautiful tree and I came to not only enjoy and relish my life as an oak tree, but to thank God every day for giving me the perfect life for me. He knew me better than I knew myself. He knew what it was that I most desired, the desires of my heart, and he gave them to me. However, they were disguised and hidden. At first, I desired what everyone else wanted as I thought these were the treasures of life. However, in the end, those treasures were false treasures.

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For I discovered that the greatest treasure and gift that he has given us is the gift of being uniquely made to reflect God in his glory. All the things I had hoped for, were like mist or clouds in the sky, here one minute but disappearing the next. He knew that those things only bring glimpses of happiness and satisfaction. The things that I desired the most were the things that help make me whole.

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Once I am whole, I have everything. There can be no greater thing than the wholeness that comes from truly accepting and loving yourself as you are and where you are. There can be no greater desire in any heart than that. That can only come, when we truly know who we are and why we have been made and our own meaning and purpose. In order to discover that, we must go on a journey of discovery to find where the seed, containing all of our DNA of who we are, comes from. However, that is another story for another day.”

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