Parable of the Tree

1. What can be said about psychological healing?  What does this mean?  Be careful of the metaphors you use.  The soul of a person is not like the body.  It heals in a completely different way.

Your body is the body of an animal.  With a scratch or a small burn, it will scab and recover, but if you lose a limb, well you’ll never get it back again.  Barring a miracle from God or medicine, you’ll just have to make do with whatever is left.

But the soul is more like the wood of a tree.  Gash off a tree limb, and yes that limb is gone, but the tree can grow around that.  It can keep growing new branches indefinitely.  Like the tree, it will always be obvious where you were wounded, but like the tree you can just keep growing somewhere else forever.  You don’t have to keep obsessing over what happened, you just do something else and then something else, and so on.

2. If trees could think and they were like people, I bet that every winter a bunch of them would be saying to themselves, “What’s wrong with me?  I’m so bad at being a tree: I can’t even hold onto any of my leaves, they just all fall off.”

“But it’s normal for trees to lose their leaves in the winter!”

“Nah uh, look at that pine over there.  He keeps his all winter.  I’m obviously just a defective tree.”

This entry was posted in Spiritual Counsel on by .

About Aron Wall

I am a physics professor at Syracuse University, as of 2026. Before that, I read Great Books at St. John's College (Santa Fe), got my physics Ph.D. from U Maryland, and did my postdocs at UC Santa Barbara, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Stanford. My first faculty position was at the University of Cambridge. The views expressed on this blog are my own, and should not be attributed to any of these fine institutions.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

My comment policy, which includes instructions for leaving LateX equations. Please do not leave an off-topic comment on a new post, unless no old posts are available on that topic. If your comment doesn't appear, please email me (it was probably caught in the spam filter).


Avoid using the symbols > or <, as these could be confused with html tags, unless of course you wanted to make an html tag, in which case some of the basic ones are available, e.g.<i>text</i> for italics, or <a href="url">text</a> for links.