The Cherry Tree 🍒

How to create more abundance, peace and love by integrating your child self 🍒

Climbing up the dilapidated, stone wall, she then shimmies onto a massive tree branch. As she gingerly climbs to her nook within the tree, she gives a sigh of pleasure and relief. This is where summer begins. Leaning back, and slowly eating the ripe, warm, cherries, that surround her like a ruby, jeweled, cloak. These luscious, sweet, generous, gifts overflowing from her cherry tree. She sometimes eats three at a time. Sometimes six. She sometimes squeezes the juice to place on her lips and cheeks, to look like the older girls she sees at school. At times she looks at the double cherries and wonders: ‘are they twins?’ As the hot, sun kissed, maroon, cherries explode in her mouth, she leans back further into the trunk. This is what it is to be truly alive, truly free.

She was an ethereal creature, a whisper of a girl, immersed deeply in ballet and anything written by any of the Brontë sister. She would see fairies fly in the garden that wore little bonnets made of pink petals. She also was surprisingly scrappy, in a tom boyish sort of way. Wearing a tank, no thought of a bra to strap on, and some worn OshKosh denims. She could climb redwood trees, when visiting her grandparents in California, and walk for miles if needed. All lanky, long limbed, awkward, but free spirited. At the sea shore, hours would be spent listening to the ocean sounds in sea shells, and wearing seaweed like a skirt. There was an endless desire and curiosity to know more about the world, and everything in it.

She was truly innocent of the cruelty of mankind, and she would rush to strangers to ask them 1000 questions about their lives. She dreamnt of traveling the world, and saving animals from abuse. She would mix herbs, flowers, fruits, and pond water in a sea shell vessel for hours concocting a “perfume” for her beloved mother.

The excitement for life and adventure was overwhelming at times. However; the other side of that spectrum was her empathy. Her sensitivity could be debilitating. Like the time her father took her to see a biblical film about Joseph and Jesus. She cried for days after, inconsolably, because of what they did to Jesus at the end of the film. Or like the time she saw her pet lamb go from grazing in the garden, to boiling in a pot. Her sweet lamb friend, its head looking at her through the pot lid on the stove, turned her into a vegetarian at a very young age. This was rural Iran, so there was no such thing as a vegetarian. Her parents would shake their heads not knowing what to do with this very stubborn, strange, and emotional creature.

This girl, pre pubescent, juxtaposed to the one that emerged years later is quite opposing. The one later, living in Los Angeles, post a traumatic escape from a revolution, post shame, having entered that arena in many insidious forms, post learning to suppress joy, was more of a sullen being. This incarnation was a sallow ghost, thin, quiet, very quiet, and obedient. That wild curiosity was now dormant, while worry had taken over. Worry, anxiety, sadness, as puberty came rushing onto a landscape that wasn’t prepared for it. She had had some inappropriate encounters with grown men, and been told that to forget to wear her underwear, would bring severe consequences. There were hard slaps to the head if she failed math, and the loss of home and pets. This girls nails were bitten down to the quick, and as her body changed, so evolved the desire to be as invisible as possible.

It’s taken decades to reconcile that lost girl in the cherry tree. That iteration of me, the hidden little girl that was my true essence. It has taken decades, as I enter my Second Spring, to feel safe enough to invite her in again. The imaginative, creative, curious, kind, funny, eccentric little girl that was locked into a lost portal, until it was safe to once again emerge. You see, that self is actually the key to meeting life with all its gifts. To access that being is to start the flow of abundance, and a soul retrieval to become whole.

During a woman’s Second Spring, the hormone of accommodation estrogen begins to wane. In TCM and other wise traditions, they believe once a woman begins to move into the next archetype from Mother to Priestess/Medicine Woman, she can recall her true self before the sex hormones took over. The being who wandered on the earth freely, before estrogen rode in hard like a tumultuous storm raining down attraction and desire. Estrogen that made her breasts swell, hair shine, and enjoy granting everyone’s wish. When taking care of others, became a biological need with no other option. Yet once that hormone begins to dissipate she asks herself questions she would never have dared before.

I believe that if you take time to incorporate that child being into your psyche the world will open up to you. Your dreams and goals may shift and realign, but you will be all the more powerful. Just as a broken vase can once again hold flowers, the cracked areas glued together, you can hold your deepest wishes and desires.

The day before the escape from Iran, during the martial law period, on a dark January day, she heard the dreaded sounds that to this day chill her heart and soul. The sounds of axes taking down trees. The landlord of the house her family was renting from, needed wood for heat since the gas companies had closed down. This was the chaotic period in Iran during the martial law that had been in effect for months. She woke up one dreary, January morning to hearing the sound of metal against wood. The sound of the chopping down of her beloved safe haven and friend. The destruction and demolition of her beloved Cherry tree. Since that moment is too close to me, too painful to recount, I choose to use Chekhov’s words to explain that moment. You see, he writes about it in his poignant play The Cherry Orchard. The play is ultimately about how the clash between nostalgia and progress affects an aristocratic family. The decline of the Russian aristocracy, in the name of social change where the modern, industrial world begins to demolish the grace of the old world. You don’t have to be a refugee as I was to feel the urgency and poignancy. We are all on the edge of an abyss in this moment in time not unlike turn of the century Russia, but what’s about to take over is AI and Government orders. Chekhov conveys that pivotal moment in history when the destruction of an orchard brings in the modern world.

The Final Act

Before departing, the family accidentally forgets their ancient, loyal servant Firs in the locked, abandoned house.

“The stage is empty. The sound of keys being turned in the locks is heard, and then the noise of the carriages going away. It is quiet. Then the sound of an axe against the trees is heard in the silence sadly and by itself. Steps are heard. FIERS comes in from the door on the right. He is dressed as usual, in a short jacket and white waistcoat; slippers on his feet. He is ill. He goes to the door and tries the handle.] Oh, these young people! Life’s gone on as if I’d never lived. [Lying down] I’ll lie down.... You’ve no strength left in you, nothing left at all.... Oh, you... bungler! [He lies without moving]. The distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, of a breaking string snapped, dying away sadly. Silence ensues, broken only by the sound of an axe striking a tree in the orchard, far away.”

Curtain.

An Exercise to help retrieve your pure self.

Write a letter to your pre adolescent self. Tell that version of you how you are sorry for having abandoned them. You can add the Ho’opnopono prayer for an extra clearing. After writing this, then list all the characteristics that you adore and miss about them.

Then you can write:” I now ask in the highest good of all, to integrate those pieces of myself into my adult self. I ask that this communion with those parts of myself bring more clarity, peace, wisdom, joy and fulfillment.”

Find a photo of that version of you and place it on your altar. Take your letter and fold it in 4s. Place the folded letter with your photo and leave it on your altar for 40 days. Each day bring an offering, it can be flowers, sea salt, lighting a candle, crystal, etc. And so it is . . .