mmm backlightingI’ve been spending a lot of time today pruning the branches on my ficus tree. The tree almost died during the move to my new condo. I felt horrible about it, since it’s a huge tree that someone gave to me. The previous owner had obviously taken a lot of care to grow it so big. It was easily 8 feet tall, and very healthy-looking when I got it. But the 15 minutes in the cold made all the leaves dry up and start to fall off.

Anyway, last week I then started to notice the little sprouts of leaves starting to come out of the lower branches. So, today I’ve been cutting off old, dead branches above the new sprouts. It was a slightly painful process because the tree now looks very bare without its big canopy of leaves, even though the leaves were dead. I noticed that some of the branches were quite wet inside, meaning the tree was trying to get moisture up into the dead areas. My theory is that if I cut off the dead parts, the tree will send that moisture to the new sprouting areas instead instead of wasting its energy where it’s not needed.

Now that the dead branches are mostly gone, it’s much easier to see the tiny new shoots of green coming up. There are a lot more of them than I saw at first. I’m hoping that the tree will concentrate its energy on nurturing these new branches. At the same time, I can’t help but think that maybe this is some kind of metaphor for life. :nod: