Sometimes a falling tree is just a falling tree

Admittedly, I may have been looking for something that wasn’t there when I told a friend what happened to me yesterday morning. At 7:30 I drove Tim out to the road to catch the school bus. The wind had been blowing in gusts all night, and there were a lot of branches and twigs littering the driveway. Then I saw something much bigger than a branch, a limb that looked practically the size of half a tree trunk, that had snapped partway off a tree and was tangled in some branches overhanging the driveway.

Clearly it could fall at any time, and I wondered when it would fall and on whom. So I worried about it for over an hour, and then I went out for a run. Just as I was running toward it, with the wind still gusting, I heard a cracking noise, and I watched as very gradually the limb splintered away from the trunk altogether and tumbled into the driveway, right across my path.

I tried to move it and was surprised to find I actually could shove it most of the way to the side, and then I called my husband, who was just getting ready to leave the house, and told him to bring work gloves when he headed out because he would probably be able to move it the rest of the way to the side of the driveway.

“Doesn’t that sound like a parable of some sort?” I asked my friend when I was done with the story. “How I worried for an hour, and then what I was worried about happened, and it wasn’t that difficult to deal with? Do you think that’s what it means: that the time you waste worrying about something could be better spent just figuring out what to do if it happens?”

“Either that, or if you see a tree that looks like it’s about to fall down, it probably will,” he replied sagely.

He was probably right. It was mere coincidence that the tree fell just as I was approaching it. I’m guilty sometimes of looking for too many meanings. I want the universe to inform me in easy and obvious ways: with parables, with allegories, with metaphors obvious as, well, a tree falling in the forest.

Sometimes, though, lessons get transmitted in just a few words, not in slowly unfolding anecdotes that involve wind gusts and peril. On Monday, the man from the septic system company paid us a visit. Our system needed some routine maintenance done, but he explained to me he couldn’t do it that day because the ice was too thick for what he needed to do.

He said it might be possible on Friday because warmer temperatures were forecasted for the latter half of the week. “Tomorrow is supposed to be really cold, though, before any thawing begins,” I said.

“It doesn’t even matter if tomorrow is cold,” he replied. “The sun will be shining and the days are getting longer, and those two things alone are making the snow melt.”

I know he was just talking about drilling into the septic system. I really do. But I kept repeating his words to myself. “The sun will be shining and the days are getting longer, and therefore the snow will melt.” We’ve had nearly two months now of regular heavy snowstorms, ever since the day after Christmas; hardly anyone has been talking about melting, but here was the septic company technician, reassuring me that winter would soon subside.

It’s been a long, cold, snowy, icy couple of months, and I really hope he’s right. I know he was referring only to ice, literal, hard and cold, and not to anything on a symbolic level. But still I found it comforting and insightful, just as from the falling tree I took the message that it was better to figure out what to do if something happened than worry that it would. The sun is shining; the days are growing longer. Maybe sometimes symbols are too easy to find if you look hard for them. But for whatever reason, both messages helped me. So I won’t stop looking.

The starfish anti-parable: It didn't make a difference to that one (as far as I could tell)

Up in Maine with my parents for a few days, I was heading out to the boat with my mother. We were walking along the pier when we spotted a starfish drying out on the wooden planks. We stopped for a moment to gaze at it, marveling at how beautiful and perfectly formed it was, medium-sized, dark pink in color, wonderfully symmetrical. “Should I toss it back?” I asked my mother. “And then do I get to say ‘It mattered to that one’?”

I lifted the starfish with my thumb and forefinger, just a little bit squeamishly, and dropped it over the side. My mother and I watched it slowly sink in the shallow saltwater below the dock. “I actually don’t think it mattered to that one,” my mother said. “I think that one was already dead.”

Still, I couldn’t help but relish the irony. I’ve gone on more than one tirade about how tired I am of the Starfish Parable that has been making the rounds through motivational speeches, Sunday school classes and commencement addresses for the past five years or more – and here I was, reenacting the very same parable, sort of. Except unlike in the fable of the child who sees an expanse of beach covered with hundreds of stranded and doomed starfish and throws one back, responding to the doubter with him who says “There are hundreds; it won’t make any difference if you throw one back” with “It made a difference to that one,” I had only one starfish to save, not hundreds, and according to my mother, it appeared likely that I failed.

Ha, I muttered to myself. I’ve always known that was a silly parable. Now I know it can’t even be replicated. How long would a starfish live out of water, anyway? How does the child in the parable know that it did in fact matter to the one he threw back? For all we know, he was too late, too. It’s just that he was tossing into the pounding surf rather than the shallow and sunlit depths that I dropped my starfish into, so I could witness my own failure, whereas Parable Boy was free to assume his starfish went on to thrive.

I first heard the starfish parable at the Massachusetts Governor’s Conference for Women in Boston in December of 2006, as told by keynote speaker Attorney General Martha Coakley. Then, as tends to happen with these little tales, especially in the Internet and YouTube era, I heard it again a week later at church. And again at an awards ceremony, and the next year at a talk by a well-known children’s author (who claims his mother told him the story when he was 12, which would have been about 1964, making it a much older fable than I had thought. But I don’t necessarily believe this particular author).

My problem with it is this: many apparent disruptions in the natural world actually happen for a reason. Most of us have heard that forest fires are actually good for forests because they consume all the extra detritus on the forest floor. If hundreds of starfish ever really did beach themselves at one time, unfortunate as it may be for each of those starfish, my guess is that there was a greater purpose served in the biosystem. For example, maybe that apparent disaster corrected a population explosion among starfish that year. Maybe plankton (or whatever starfish eat) prospered that season, with some positive effect on the ecosystem underwater. Maybe seals (or whatever eat starfish) were having an overpopulation problem of their own that year, and a diminution in the starfish supply resulted in the seal population evening out.

Far be it from me to want starfish to die, but I always wonder if anyone else has the same suspicions about this particular tale. Is there possibly a reason that starfish stranded themselves on a beach? Not that it really matters, of course. Maybe it did “matter to that one,” in the case of the one the boy tossed back, but his decision to throw one back probably didn’t change whatever effect on the biosystem a mass stranding of starfish was going to have.

I’ve thought about this parable a lot. So not only was it fascinating to see a perfectly formed starfish on the pier yesterday morning; it also seemed a little bit like a sign to me. Like maybe a reminder that I’m right and that parable is silly; maybe you can’t fix some things just by making one small gesture and just maybe, you shouldn’t even have the hubris to try. Nature seldom needs correcting.

That pretty starfish appeared to sink to the bottom, dead from its stay in the sun. But it’s always possible a bottom-dwelling creature ate it anyway and prospered as a result. And maybe that’s what was meant to happen in the natural order of things all along.