The Banyan Tree - II

Dear Banyan Tree,

I didn’t notice this before... or didnt think of it this way. 

Your endurance is not through rigidity, but through continuously creating new connections to the ground.

While most trees rise away from the earth, you keep returning to it. Again and again. You are strange that way... you dont just grow upward. You keeping sending roots back to the earth, holding on from many places at once.

Perhaps life asks the same of us.

We survive not by remaining unchanged, but by learning where to bend, where to hold on, and where to create fresh anchors for the soul. Sometimes those anchors are people. Sometimes memories. Sometimes faith, rituals, routines, or quiet conversations with ourselves. Relationships are like your roots too. They may begin from one simple connection, but over time they grow into many things — friendship, responsibility, shared history, silence, distance, care. Different forms, yet all quietly holding the same life together.

Today I looked at you differently. And, I looked at life differently too.

We are often told to find one purpose, one soulmate, one core identity. But perhaps life was never meant to stand on a single trunk alone.

A life depending on only one thing becomes fragile. When that one connection breaks, everything feels shaken. Resilience is about creating many roots into life. We are held not by one thing alone, but by many anchors, our family, our work, old friends who knew us years ago, new friends, small daily rituals, books that understand us, memories we return to, and the private promises we keep to ourselves.

And when one part of life goes through a drought, the other roots quietly keep us alive. Growth, then, is not about leaving the earth behind to chase the sky. It is about a continuous, sacred return to the ground.

We survive by bending. We endure by expanding. We live by trusting the gravity that pulls us back to what matters.