Ego Magic
A Redwood's Resilience: Living on Your Terms ; an open letter to the other witch in the woods (#3)
The Lone Survivor
In the Bay Area of Oakland today stands one singular redwood tree—the one that survived the onslaught of the Redwood Rangers from 1849. They sawed, milled, and dominated an entire old-growth redwood forest by 1860. It took eleven years for these legendary outlaws, with a talent for exploitation unseen in this country before.
Now, overlooking the Bay, we see street cars and undulating steep streets of small town houses and one singular remaining redwood tree. Why did this tree, out of the thousands milled, survive? Well… it wasn’t useful. It was scrawny compared to its millennia-old siblings and a bit bent. The bandits looked at this tree and said, "It’s not gonna make me money, all warbled like that. Not worth the effort."
And just like that, a tree—warbled, small, and scrawny by the standards of its family—was allowed to live because it wasn’t useful. This tree is known as The Old Survivor. Old Survivor’s story clarified for me an element of my own life.
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