I spent some time out in Helechwa picking through a cutoff pile at the mouth of a holler that was recently logged. This wasn't the first time I've had an opportunity like this, but each one is bittersweet. Knowing I have a chance to repurpose what someone else has deemed unfit for use gives me a greater sense of self. Breathing life back into something discarded is second nature to me. This concept draws a lot of parallels in life for me.
All too often, I feel pain on behalf of the trees being subjected to clear cutting brought on by the glimmer of money in the distance. But there are always two sides to the story. Like when a good woman gets the chance to buy back the land her father sold to send her to college, but at the price of the trees she once wandered through as a child.
Again, I can't help but see how my life follows a similar storyline.
For me, there is an overwhelming feeling of joy and happiness that comes from transforming something rotten at the core into a vessel for storytelling. Maybe that too is a metaphor for my life; letting things run alongside one another, never intersecting. Or perhaps not. Only time will tell if those lines will ever cross.
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