The wind came one year and showed me something I had not wanted to know.
Before that, the trees on our land had always seemed permanent. They stood like quiet guardians—tall, rooted, unmoving in a way that made me believe the world itself was steady.
But the wind arrived differently that year. Not as a breeze or a passing storm. It came like a teacher. The trees began to move in ways I had never seen before. They did not simply sway. They bent, rocked by invisible hands, pushed into shapes that felt wrong to witness. Their trunks twisted and bowed as if the sky itself had grabbed hold of them. And I was terrified because if the wind could bend the trees, it could break them. If something that strong could break, what chance did I have? Compared to those towering beings—seventy, ninety, a hundred feet tall—I was nothing. Their roots had held earth for decades. Their bark had endured snow and lightning and summer heat. Still, the wind moved them. I felt suddenly small and fragile in a way I had never allowed myself to feel.
That year we lost dozens of trees.
I remember standing there, stunned by the power of wind. It felt like meeting a stranger I thought I knew. I had never really considered the wind before. It was just something that tangled my hair, cooled my skin, pushed rain sideways, slowed my stride uphill. Sometimes it felt playful—brushing past me like a curious animal, lifting my hands when I danced them out the window of a moving car. But now I saw another side of it.
How could something so gentle also carry such force?
I did not yet understand that the world holds both at once.
On our land there is a treehouse built around a tall, beautiful tree that grows straight through its center. During that storm the top of that tree snapped and tore through the roof. Even now the scar remains. And the forest still stands around our home—those enormous trees towering above us while we sleep. Sometimes I think about how easily one of them could fall. How simply gravity could choose us.
But something in me has changed since that first storm because now I see the trees differently. When the wind moves through them they come alive. Branches wave like arms greeting the sky. Leaves shimmer like thousands of small voices speaking at once.
They were always alive this way. I just couldn’t see it before. So now I sit quietly and watch them move. I thank the wind for showing me what strength really is. Not permanence, not hardness, but the willingness to move.
If a tree falls someday, it will fall because it must. The forest knows something I do not. There is a rhythm beneath these hills older than my fear. And when that day comes, I will love the tree even as it falls. Until then I love it while it stands.
Sometimes, if I look long enough at the bark, faces appear in the patterns of the wood. Spirits, maybe. Or just the forest reminding me to pay attention. Today I saw one that startled me. The bark had shaped itself into the profile of an old woman’s face. At first she looked severe, almost frightening, as if she had turned suddenly to look at me. But when I kept staring, the shape changed. Her mouth curved. Her eyes softened. And I realized she wasn’t glaring at me at all. She was laughing. Laughing the way old forests laugh when young creatures finally begin to understand.
