Naked Trees

I put one foot in front of the other as I gave a visit to the concrete.  THis would be another day of walking home from school that I experienced this past week. I gazed into the black and white of my checkered vans shoes as the scent of winter filled my nostrils and I exhaled, tilting my head and seeing the townhouses to my right I shifted my vision to the left. Ice. Looking down again I managed to dodge an ice patch and continued on my walk--my mind and eyes fixed upon a certain tree.


This brought my mind to another walk I took on my way home from school, only this time i was 4 years old and my Mother was my companion on this autumn day in 1990. ( I just stopped to think about this and couldn't help but chuckle.) As we walked hand-in-hand, Mother and Daughter, we admired the trees in Lorton, Virginia. In autumn, during this time, all the leaves had fallen to the ground and layed beneath the towering bark, waiting to be bagged. I remember this day she taught me a lesson in english writing, about the term personification. She said, "Dianita, look the trees are naked." Smiling I looked up at the pale wood trunk and branches that laid in front of a blue background, with their clothes laying on the cold ground...in the shape of rigid leaves. After that day, whenever I saw trees with their fallen leaves, i would happy proclaim, "Look, the trees are naked!"


On this walk of mine, as I continued on my walk--January--2010--I began looking at another tree just up ahead to the right of me. It was naked and because of that I could study it's body. The trunk, thick and secure and then it's branches or hands and arms. The wind was strong and as i tucked my head into my jacket avoiding it's piercings.I told my mimd to focus on my music I was listening to instead of how cold I felt, and then what I saw became profound............................................




"We tend to think of the results of repentance as simply cleansing us from sin. But that is an incomplete view of the matter. A person who sins is like a tree that bends easily in the wind. On a windy and rainy day, the tree bends so deeply against the ground that the leaves become soiled with mud, like sin. If we focus only on cleaning the leaves, the weakness in the tree that allowed it to bend and soil its leaves may remain. Similarly, a person who is merely sorry to be soiled by sin will sin again in the next high wind. The susceptibility to repetition continues until the tree has been strengthened."




Elder Dallin H. Oaks, 1990, Sin & Suffering, p. 5