A SMALL TREE grows near the parking lot at a state park close to my home. I noticed this tree more than a decade ago when our children were very small: A sapling rooted in the crack of a giant boulder.
Over the past 14 years the split in the boulder has widened. As the tree has gotten a little taller and broader, the rock has gradually changed its shape, splitting and cracking. The tree’s bark folds around the rock; the two have become inextricably bound up with one another.
Social transformation can be slow, quiet work, like roots pushing their way through rock. It’s often hard to see the impact your life, your work, your presence, your art, your words are making on the impenetrable forces around you. Ask me to move a two-ton rock and I’ll laugh in your face; it's impossible. And yet, I remember that little tree.
Extremely heavy forces are at work in this world: racism, misogyny, greed, violence. And yet people keep finding ways — like that tree growing down into stone — to stay rooted, find joy, grow, even thrive. What if the response to these very real and very heavy stones threatening to crush our humanity is not a sledgehammer but a sprout?
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