The Hollow of the Tree

One day, she saw it—a timeless tree standing tall, defying the years. But what captivated her wasn’t its grandeur or the vast reach of its branches. It was the deep, dark hollow in its trunk that drew her attention. A space that was once full, now left empty… And yet, the tree stood firm, its roots gripping the earth tightly, its leaves whispering with the wind.

In that moment, she thought about the voids within herself. The wounds she had tried to ignore but could always feel lingering beneath the surface… The traces of a love that had slowly isolated her, the family she grew up in, shaping her with its silent tragedies. She had struggled so hard to connect with someone that, without realizing it, she had disconnected from herself. What she thought was love had turned into a cycle of manipulation—an unconscious exchange where both sides gave and took without truly understanding.

But what about her? Hadn’t she also been unknowingly part of the same cycle? Most human relationships were built upon emotional exchanges they were barely aware of. In her attempts to complete her missing pieces in others, she sometimes mistook love for security, sometimes for validation. And finally, when she was left utterly alone, she had to see what remained. She realized that she could no longer escape facing her wounds. By meditating, by simply stopping and looking, without deceiving herself, she revisited her past.

But the world does not prepare you for such silence. It demands that you keep moving, stay distracted, numbed by external forces. Yet, when she stopped running, when she truly looked, she saw the patterns that had shaped her. To find their roots, she had to return to her childhood, to her family.

She wanted to heal those roots. To mend the severed bonds, to understand the harm she had inflicted on each other—sometimes intentionally, sometimes simply doing the best they could. But wounds that have been buried for years do not surface easily. Her father, hardened by his own silent pain, met her words with avoidance and anger. Her brother, having grown up believing in only one version of reality, saw her attempts to share her awareness as a threat. They were all unknowingly carrying the wounds passed down to them.

And yet, she did not blame them. Just as she no longer blamed the love that once consumed her. They were all part of a cycle created by those who came before them. People shaped by fears, traumas, and the chains of the past stretching into the present.

Then, she looked at the tree again. She ran her fingers along the edge of its hollow and understood: Its emptiness, its missing parts did not make it flawed. They did not make it incomplete. The tree did not mourn what it had lost. It kept growing, deepening its roots, stretching its branches toward the sky.

And she, too, will grow. With her voids. With her wounds. Not despite them, but because of them.