I was thinking this weekend of the metaphor of the trees: those that cover the lower peaks of the White Mountains, their roots knitted together like fingers knotted in prayer, interwoven with matted grasses and weeds, and held in place by the understory of bushes and brambles. All of that green life exposed to the winds of winter and summer’s storms, in little more than a foot of soil: beneath that veneer, granite ledge.

In the mountains, we have blazed trails to take us to high places, and the habit of our paces on these well-worn paths have cut down to the stone. There the soil and the intertwined roots, the fabric of the grasses and the relationship between neighboring trees has been broken. Where the fingers of one don’t reach another, it is easy for the wind — when the wind blows stronger — to tear at the limbs and pull them over, to wrench the root mass from its fragile hold on earth, to fell the tree that lacks its accustomed support. The roots don’t go deep enough. Without support, sometimes no depth is deep enough.

I considered the stories my parents have shared this year, as they and their generation approach eighty, and one by one their friends and their family fall away: the fabric is loosened, and it is easier for a life to falter, for a body to fall under the strain of weather or wind, the wind of ill health, or whatever it happens to be… when the network of community is no longer there.

Then, what if the fabric is held strong? If we, as we age, are surrounded and connected to younger generations, included in the river of life, won’t the individual, supported, remain vital longer, be less susceptible to winds?

Anonymity can never forge community, and it is only in some shared vision and the acceptance of our human condition that we can stand side-by-side and weather any storm, whether the challenges we face are those of creating, or of maintaining, or (hardest of all), of letting go.

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