In the past few weeks of silence here, I’ve been living a life more like a tree.
I bought nothing but a one-way ticket to an island, and let everything else unfold as it wished.
—
So it went,
Parked in the wrong spot and missed the dive boat, I stumbled onto the last departure of the night, just in time to see manta rays that the captain called “more than I’ve ever seen.”
Because my budget was tight, I improvised a night in the car, unknowingly parking at a stargazing lot, sleep never came, but see the most gorgeous sunrise in my life.
Didn’t expect the volcano to erupt, I trusted nature’s own rhythm, yet when it did, I was only five minutes away. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with an elderly woman on the ridge, I became one of the first to witness the earth tremble and crack open.
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None of this was something I chased. Some of it was even the result of so-called mistakes.
It all came when I softened my grip, opened my palms to life, and let it draw close on its own.
I used to half-believe in manifestation, thinking: “If I want something badly enough, I can attract it.”
But after this journey of serendipity, I was reminded again and again that the beauty of life lies in its unpredictability.
Any picture of the future, good or bad, is a form of limitation.
It narrows our connection to the present, because expectation breeds tension, effort, control, even a subtle sense of transaction.
And beyond that—the future often turns out wider, wilder, and more beautiful than anything we could have imagined.
—
This shifted something in me.
I moved from “I want to do something, but I’m afraid of the consequences”
to “I want something, so I’ll begin.”
Because I’ve found that when I trust myself fully, life catches me gently—and sometimes surprises me with gifts I never saw coming.
As Virginia Woolf wrote more than 90 years ago:
I rooted, but I flow.
Like a tree, rooted deeply in the soil, steady, unwavering, attuned to my own needs.
And at the same time, reaching skyward
branches stretching into the winds from the sea, the sun rising on the plain, the small bird pausing on new leaves. Feeling the world open toward me, my senses can reach anywhere they wish.
To let everything flow through you.
To realize that flow is not instability, but a deeper kind of trust and resilience.
That you can hold onto nothing, and still be held.
Rooted in yourself, you can grow freely in any direction.