Category Archives: religion

Lessons from a Floating Forest: Roots and Change

Nearly one hundred trees crossed a lake without ceasing to be a forest.

That sentence sounds like the beginning of a fable, but it happened on Williston Lake in British Columbia. A densely wooded island—roughly 500 feet long and 250 feet wide—appeared where no island was marked on any map. Then it vanished. Days later, it surfaced nearly twenty miles away.

According to reporting from The Guardian, the mass likely formed over years as plants and trees grew through layers of woody debris along the shoreline. Their roots became intertwined. When unusually high water lifted the whole thing loose, the island didn’t immediately fall apart. It moved as a community.

The trees were still rooted. They just weren’t stationary.

A densely wooded floating island carrying mature trees across a broad northern lake beneath an overcast sky.
Nearly one hundred trees crossed a lake without ceasing to be a forest.

I think we confuse those two ideas more often than we realize, especially in small towns. We talk about being rooted as though it means staying in the same job, the same role, the same relationship, or the same patch of ground forever. Remaining becomes proof of character. Leaving begins to resemble betrayal.

I’m guilty of this notion. One of my favorite things to tell people is, “My family has been scattered up and down Highway 22 for over two hundred years.”

But roots have more than one purpose. Some anchor a tree to the soil. Others hold soil together. Sometimes they do both. On that island, the same roots that once attached the trees to a shoreline became the thing that allowed an entire living world to survive after the shoreline let go.

That distinction matters to me.

I was shaped by Dardanelle, by Carden Bottoms, by family stories, church language, hometown traditions, and the kind of people who believe showing up matters even when nobody applauds it. None of that disappears if my life changes shape. I can leave a position without abandoning the people who taught me how to work. I can enter a new chapter without pretending the earlier chapters were wasted.

Gratitude for where you have been does not require a lifetime contract with who you have been there with.

Intertwined tree roots binding soil, moss, and young plants together at the edge of moving water.
Roots can do more than anchor us. They can hold a world together.

Still, movement is not painless. The island on Williston Lake is not gliding across the water like some peaceful little vacation spot. Its edges are thin and shaky. Mature trees sway in the chop. It is exposed to wind, current, and forces it did not choose. Nobody knows exactly where it will settle or whether it will remain intact.

That sounds more like change as I know it.

We like to tell stories about brave departures after we already know they worked out. From the safe side of the outcome, every hard choice looks like courage. In the middle of it, movement often feels like instability. It can make a person question his judgment, his loyalty, and even his identity. The old ground may have been limiting, but at least it was ground.

Fatherhood has taught me another version of this. We spend years trying to give our children roots, knowing that healthy roots are supposed to help them grow beyond us. The goal is not to make them stationary. It’s to give them something portable: a work ethic, a faith, a family story, a way of treating people, and a clear path home. A child can move forward without leaving the family behind because the family has already traveled inside him.

Towns can travel that way too. Dardanelle goes with me in the phrases I use, the stories I tell, the way I measure a person, and the instinct to notice who showed up when things got hard. Carden Bottoms is not only a location on a map. It is a memory carried inside of many people.

A father and three children walking together along a rural Arkansas levee road at sunrise.
What matters can travel with us.

Faith, at its best, understands this. It does not always promise that the shoreline will remain beneath us. Sometimes it asks us to trust that what has been formed in us can survive a change in geography, title, season, or circumstance. The destination may be uncertain without the movement being wrong.

Maybe being rooted has less to do with refusing to move and more to do with knowing what must move with you. Your values. Your people. Your stories. Your faith. The pieces that keep you recognizable when the landscape changes.

Some roots hold you to a place. Others hold you together while you move.

Grief as a Crumple Zone: Navigating Loss with Grace

There’s more empty space inside a modern football helmet than you might expect.

That space isn’t wasted. It’s part of what keeps the person inside alive.

The shell, padding and collapsible liners are designed to move and compress. To give the force of a collision somewhere to go before it reaches the head inside. Morning Brew summarized the science in six words: “Distance makes the head blow softer.”

The layered interior of an unbranded football helmet resting on a worn locker-room bench.

That may the best explanation of grief I have ever heard.

Most of us were taught that strong things don’t bend. Strong men keep working. Strong parents hold the family together. Strong Christians trust God and do not ask too many uncomfortable questions. After the funeral, the breakup or the diagnosis, we straighten our backs and try to make our pain as unobtrusive as possible.

People tell us how well we are holding up.

Sometimes what they mean is that we have made our suffering convenient for everyone else.

When my mother died at 60, I learned there is a difference between knowing something and surviving contact with it. I had always known people die. I also know Arkansas is hot in August. Knowledge is one thing. Stepping outside is another.

Death stopped being an idea and became a collision.

I wanted to be strong. I thought strength meant showing as little damage as possible. But rigid is not the same as strong. Rigid is often just one hard hit away from being broken.

A solitary man seated quietly in a modest rural Arkansas church.

The Virginia Tech Helmet Lab is blunt about this: no helmet is concussion-proof. Better equipment can reduce risk, but it cannot make a violent game harmless. Rules matter. Technique matters. What happens before the impact matters, too.

Grief works the same way. There is no prayer, friendship, ritual or number of calendar pages that makes loss harmless. Faith does not make the funeral less final. A good friend cannot fill an empty chair. Writing can’t revise a page that has already been torn from the story.

But those things can create space.

A friend who sits beside you without trying to fix you. A church pew where you no longer have to pretend you understand. A story told again because saying the name keeps the person from disappearing completely. A notebook, a long drive, a meal somebody leaves on the porch, or a quiet morning when you finally allow yourself to cry.

These are not cures. They are crumple zones.

They give some of the force somewhere else to travel.

A worn journal, Bible, coffee and faded family photograph on an old kitchen table at first light.

We tend to treat yielding as failure. We apologize for the tears. We feel guilty for needing rest. We rush to become the version of ourselves who is “doing better,” mostly because grief makes other people nervous and, if we are honest, it makes us nervous too.

But maybe being strong was never supposed to mean walking away unmarked.

Children grow up. Relationships end. Parents die. Houses empty. Photographs that once looked ordinary begin knocking the breath out of us. Some collisions cannot be prevented, and no honest version of faith or self-help should promise otherwise.

The purpose of a crumple zone is not to pretend the wreck did not happen. The bent metal is proof that it did.

It is also proof that something was allowed to give so the person inside could survive.

Maybe grief needs the same mercy.

Mitakpa–Impermanence

I recently read a book entitled “The Comfort Crisis” by Michael Easter. You can pick it up here if you are interested. It is a phenomenal read and beautifully puts into perspective the relative ease of our current lifestyles and the somewhat shocking problems that derive from it. It is overflowing with ideas to research outside of its covers and I’m sure this won’t be the only blog post I write thanks to the abundance of interesting topics it covers. But one topic, more than anything, really resounded with me, and that was the idea of mitakpa.

Mitakpa is a Tibetan word that roughly translates to impermanence in English. When I thought about it, I realized that I was almost certain I had ever used that word and wasn’t sure if I had ever seen it come up in text or conversation. I had a feeling I knew the jest of it, but I looked up the Dictionary.com definition of it just to be sure.

 noun

the fact or quality of being temporary or short-lived:

As taught by Buddhists, the idea of mitakpa is that everything born is subject to death and decay. They practice the concept by deliberately thinking about death and the dying process 3 times daily—once each in the morning, midday, and evening. You may be thinking what I was thinking when I read that. “Wow, what a miserable thing to do.” But when I learned how they expounded on that, it made a lot of sense both practically and philosophically.

They look at life as a journey towards a cliff in which everyone, inevitably, will walk off one day. It may be tomorrow, or it may be in 80 years, but one day it will happen. We have two choices regarding that cliff. We can either act like it isn’t there and be surprised when we find it, or we can acknowledge its existence and plan our course accordingly. It has real “one life to live” vibes but it hit me on a completely different level.

You can live a complete life without ever thinking about the cliff but imagine how differently you would chart your course if you made peace with the destination. I thought about who I was walking with, what we did along the way, and all the flowers I would regret not stopping and smelling on the way when I saw the cliff come into view.

I also thought about the people that chose to walk with me. Would they come to the end of their journey and wish they had walked with someone else? Was there something they wanted to stop and do along the way that I ignored while placing a higher priority on someone else? Good grief when you think about it, what an honor it would be for someone to choose to walk to the edge of that cliff with you. Am I doing everything imaginable to make their journey just as fulfilling as mine?

One great thing about youth is that, if you’re lucky, you don’t have to think about death very often. If luck continues to be on your side, you won’t have to deal with it much at all until you get older, more mature, and better capable of dealing with it properly. I was lucky on both counts but it seems as though my luck has finally caught up with me. I’ve now lost all my grandparents and recently just laid to rest my mother, who was 60.

My mom was still alive while I was reading “The Comfort Crisis,” but she wasn’t doing very well, and the thought of her potentially dying had begun to creep into my mind from time to time. I thought about her journey to the edge of the cliff and wondered if she had a fulfilling trip. I hoped she hadn’t experienced too many regrets and I prayed the time she spent with me was something that made her trip a little more enjoyable. I was also curious as to whether she could see the end or not and if she could, had she made peace with her journey? It comforts me to think that she did.

I don’t think about death 3 times a day as the monks do, but I do try to make a point to think about it from time to time. It takes me out of my comfort zone a little bit and helps keep me centered on the truly important things. I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I do feel certain about one thing–life is a tremendous blessing and should be treated as such. I feel fortunate to be alive and healthy with no sign of my cliff in sight for the moment. When it finally does enter my horizon, I hope to greet it with a smile and walk off it with no regrets.