Up With Your Roots!

The premise of this post is going to make you jealous, so feel free to just deal with that emotion right now. Eric and I went to Costa Rica for a week and we did all the cool things imaginable. We went zip-lining and hiking and kayaking and rafting and rappelling and canyoning. We saw just-hatched baby sea turtles find their way to the ocean. We ate so wonderfully much arroz con pollo that we didn't look so great in our swimsuits. So yeah. It was awesome and as much as you're happy for us, now you want to do all that cool stuff too.

If it helps any at all, we had to sleep with spiders and scorpions and beetles flying at our heads. And don't even get me started on the way howler monkeys are obviously in some kind of competition with roosters and donkeys for waking folks up at irritating hours. Because the monkeys are winning. Hard.

Are we better now? Have I evened things out? Because I'd like to get to the point. Which is this:

Have you ever seen one of these guys? It's called a walking palm. Now I haven't done a lot of research, but I don't think we have them around here. They need a pretty dense rainforest to do what they do, and while we're perfectly willing to slap a bumper sticker on our car about saving the rainforest, don't ask us to host one--they're all kinds of eco-friendly work.

Although I could happily write a post about our resistance to environmentally friendly lifestyles, that isn't the point of this post. It really is the walking palm. Just this one little species among the thousands.

The thing that's interesting about the walking palm is that it does exactly what the name suggests. It walks. In some cases, many feet in under a decade. That may not sound very impressive, but trust me--if you watched a tree in your yard start at the street and end up on your doorstep before the kids graduated middle school, you'd be calling National Geographic. It's an incredible feat, and one foreign to most (if not all?) other trees.

If you understand anything at all about nature, you've probably already guessed the walking palm walks to get what it needs. This tree requires lots of sunlight; but its habitat, as I mentioned, is the very dense rainforest. The walking palm has a lot of competition. Many species are fast-growing, and most are pretty huge too. 

The landscape changes quickly and often, and the walking palm has to do that special thing it does to keep up with the changes. In all sincerity, this tree just picks up its roots and moves to a more advantageous spot.

Never one to miss a good metaphor when it walks my way, I immediately saw the lesson to be learned from this amazing tree. When the place I'm in isn't working for me anymore, move. If a tree--a member of an unwaveringly immobile family--can do it, what exactly is my excuse?

Now let's be real for a second. I've been a walking palm for awhile now. I found myself in a rainforest with no sun a few years ago, and I got busy picking up my roots and heading toward the light. The thing is, I've felt really bad about it. 

Every time I pick my beautiful daughter up out of the shade and move her to a spot that will net us a few more rays, I worry about what that uprooting is doing to her. We've all heard how kids need stability and predictability to be successful, and heaven knows Ayana has had neither.

But this walking palm has given me new hope. I'm trying to see myself as the tree and Ayana as a cute little fern who lives on me. For the fern, the consistent thing is the tree itself. The fern actually trusts the tree to move toward the sun, or the fern, too, will die.

So this is my none-too-subtle message to all of you out there living in a dark place: channel your inner walking palm. You think your roots have to stay in the same place--isn't that kind of the definition of roots? But no. The walking palm is a reminder that there's an exception to every rule. If your very life depends on finding the light, your roots will come along with you.