A Tree on a Rock

Quotes from Alice Walker


“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have”

“In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.”




I found these quotes while searching for something else. I now forget what it was I was searching for. Perhaps the search was only a decoy to draw me to what I needed to find today.

There are some days it bothers me that what brings intense joy into moments of my life are so insignificant to the rest of humanity. I was on a hike the other day and saw this tree near the top of a rocky mountain top, which had grown up out of a crack in a rock face. The tree was old, short, knurled and distorted from trying to grow out rock at this high elevation.

It had grown, in spite of all the obstacles and was beautiful; so much a wonder, more so than all the others, I saw that day. If I had not gone so far off the trail and hiked up the mountain, I would never have seen it. I knew then why I feel such a closeness when in the mountains or on the shore.

It seems the trees and nature, in their/her silence, speak more to my soul than those who should be close to me. I think it would have been better to have been a tree than a human. Trees never have to listen to how wrong they are for being a tree, even in the worst of places.

Like that tree, I will never be other than who I am or stop reaching for the stars with each breath, even when everything around me says “you shouldn’t be here.”