A Heart Shaped Message

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A Heart Shaped Message

In September of 2019 my husband and I drove south from our home in New Jersey to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia on the east coast of the United States.  We arrived in the Shenandoah Valley early in the day.  Truth be told, my home is bordered by beautiful woods; however, because now I was less distracted by life, I was able to notice the extraordinary manifestations of nature.  On this day, after we checked into the Inn, we went for a hike and happened upon a tree that offered a special gift from Nature. How lucky I felt to notice it! It appeared that the tree had been somehow injured and the callous it created sealed its wound into the shape of a heart!  

If a tree is wounded, it forms callous tissue around the edges of the wound and creates a protective boundary preventing infection and decay from spreading into the new tissue. The tree isolates the older injured tissue with the gradual growth of new healthy tissue.  

I cannot say that at the time I recognized the spectacular connectivity between how trees “seal” their wounds and how humans also “seal” their wounds through scarring, both physically and emotionally. The difference being that trees don’t judge their scars, like we humans do. Instead, we spend so much time, money, and emotional energy trying to cover up our scars and erase them. 

I felt a deep connection with this tree. It took my breath away.  The tree had created a glorious, shockingly apropos heart from its wound. Yet, when I revisited the photo as I wrote this essay I suddenly wondered if a human had carved that heart around the knot. The thought saddened me. Carving into bark damages trees. Yet, the insights I had gained from my first perception of a heart forming a scar around the tree’s wound stayed with me. A picture had already formed in my mind - of the tree representing nature, and a person, representing humankind, together creating a symbol of love from a scar that has helped to heal a wound.  This message now held a clarity that I had never been quite so aware of. 

Scars, all scars, are worthy of our tender and attentive love.  Not something to be erased. Our scars and nature’s scars can be recognized as avenues to loving ourselves and opening more deeply to possibilities of healing - ourselves, nature, the earth, and our human world.

From my heart to yours,

Lis Traphagen
OMEC/Board of Directors