Stumps and Coincidences
I’ve been out a lot digging my hands in real dirt, so this one is short. No tl;dr section. Just a quick story.
Stumps
Recently, I’ve become obsessed with tree stumps.
This new habit started with the tragic felling and removal of a neighborhood tree-sister whose “branches were leaning on a transformer.” Even though it was just her branches. Even though I’m reasonably confident they could have been pruned instead.
I’ve certainly seen downed trees before. But I just can’t shake her. Probably because her sap was the color of human blood and when I saw her, my body hurt. Since then, I have been haunted by empathy pains from phantom limbs never my own.
Days after she was carted away – to become firewood, I suppose – I walked by her rooted remaining stump.
I paused.
I know this seems far-fetched to most people (even I might have dismissed this as hippie-woo-woo if I hadn’t experienced it myself), but I swear she asked me to look out for other fallen tree-people.
What was I to do? I couldn’t just ignore her.
Being the nature-based learning advocate that I am, the most obvious and, frankly, literal thing I could think — recalling her body sawed into stump-seat-sized pieces – was for other tree-people to be reincarnated as seats for little learners in outdoor classrooms.
Coincidences
It so happens that my conversation with my fallen tree-sister happened just before my friend Susan took me to visit a classroom so dark I could scarcely see the 26 first grade students. One bare fluorescent bulb on the ceiling cast the teacher’s shadow on the wall. No chance the students could see the writing on the chalkboard. The sole window faced a building just 2 feet away.
It was another sign: an outdoor classroom here could shed literal light on learners and learning. And metaphorical light and hope and joy too. The good news is that the school has a little outdoor space perfect for an outdoor classroom hidden behind a torn wall of corrugated iron sheets.
Even though my mathy friend Steve has pointed out that coincidences are mostly invented by the “coincidencee” seeing magic when something like sharing a birthday with a friend is statistically mundane, I am sure this coincidence is special.
A squandered tree-person’s body and a dark dungeon of a classroom — plus a school leader open to innovation and motivated to do whatever he can to improve life for his students — all entering my life within days of each other is not a coincidence I can ignore.
Reincarnation
So now there’s a scrappy team of us gluing together an outdoor classroom with sheet metal, nails, sap, and love for those 26 learners and their teacher. We’ll start there.
I predict it will be so awesome, the School Head will need to create a schedule so all 205 students and their teachers get to enjoy the outdoor learning oasis.
It will be beautiful. You’ll see.
❤️,
Becca
This is so beautiful Becca. Thanks for sharing.
Great impact it will be to the school and maybe the left roots of the tree might sprout later in it's life