Both/And

What Rings of Trees Teach Us About Wisdom

Tree Rings teach us about wisdom. They’re a living picture for what it means to grow, mature and become wise. Resumes struggle with this as they tend to reflect ego by design. They highlight good stuff and hide the stuff that could mar the image or brand I’ve made of myself.

Trees do the opposite. They include negatives with positives, gaffs with gifts, and wounds with wins. They use everything that came before to create an emerging layer of new life now. They ruthlessly include their whole story. Not just current events, but all that’s happened year by year since they were seedlings.

Tree Rings tell that story. They chronicle every drought, every forest fire, every blight, and every fruitful year of abundant rainfall and sunshine. Each ring includes all the years of rings that came before it, and is included by every ring yet to come. Nothing is wasted. That’s Wisdom.

I feel like I’m wiser when I read the story hidden and held within my body. It’s an integrated story that includes all phases of my spiritual and social development, even the ones I now find embarrassing. My childhood self, little Joey, still lives within me, still funny, fearful, and full of ideas. I listen to him kindly and let him ride with me in the car of my life. He’s fun to be with, but I don’t let him drive anymore.

It’s like that with my faith too. I still believe, but my beliefs are far different than they used to be. Today I try to include my “used-to-believes” without regret because I had to start somewhere. And because I’ve learned something important from each of them, that has helped me to grow. Life lessons, which I could learn no other way.

Like trees, our spirits include the rings of our past to create the present, and from it, the future. As Richard Rohr says, “Everything Belongs”. All things play their part in our growth and development, even the bad things. And the way to get past them is to include them. And not to pretend they don’t exist. Acknowledge them, and while you’re at it, acknowledge how much you’ve grown since that time. And then you can identify today’s growing edges more clearly.

Spiritual growth and Wisdom are a process where we learn to include our weaknesses with our strengths, our failures with our successes, and our one-step-backward with our two-steps-forward. That’s how we find our “growing edges” and move beyond them.

It’s about “Both/And”, not “Either/Or.” It’s about our Strengths and our Weaknesses, our Gifts and our Gaffs, Our Best Intentions and our Worst Mistakes. Like trees, when integrate these opposites we create a fertile foundation for adding a new ring of life each year. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it.