Welcome to Life

They planted the seedling in the spring, finding good soil where there would be sunshine and clean air and soft rain to nurture and protect it. It was surrounded by adult trees to watch over it and see it grow, strong and proud trees that would always be there come bad weather or hard times. There were elms to provide shade, oaks to help it stand on its own, sugar maples to bring out its sweetness. Their limbs and leaves swayed in the light breeze as they celebrated the new arrival and there was music in the air.

Spring is a good time to come into the world, a sweet season rich in promise, new life and unforeseen change. After a seedling is born, nothing is ever the same, and parents reach out and embrace this lifelong gift with awe and wonder. Young trees are precious and fragile, dependent on their elders for care and shelter and love, learning to take their first steps under caring and watchful eyes. We tend them with a combination of delicacy and firmness that we learn as we go - we watch and worry, sleep less and ask more questions, put their welfare ahead of our own, and are amazed by our own competence and their complete innocence. We are never as prepared as we imagine, each day brings new challenges, new discoveries. These are small miracles, the elder trees know, and they smile with pride and gratitude, warmed by their old memories and eagerly anxious for those in the making.

The seedling knows nothing of this - know not that it has been waited and planned for, dreamed of and loved before it took its first breath, knows not that it is a small miracle and will always be so. In time it will bloom and ripen, learn and grow and reach for the sun, but for now it finds contentment and peace in just being. It leaves the nursery for its new home, warm and sleepy and secure, to be tended by devoted gardeners who will make up for what they don't know about seedlings, with love.

There will be abundant light and water and nutrients for the soil - just as there were for its mother and her siblings - and a forest of older trees in the wings and watching from above.

Welcome to the world, TJP. Welcome to life, seedling, we've been waiting for you.