The Tree Stump

In my yard sits an old tree stump. It is grey, weathered, and heavy. It no longer reaches toward the sky, and it will never sprout branches of its own again. But life has not stopped around it. Bright green moss has taken hold of its sides. Other trees rise up right beside it, their leaves brushing against its bark, and invisible roots move quietly beneath it. The living world continues. The stump is there, but it cannot command the things around it to stop growing.

I keep this image close to me because recently, it revealed to me the truth that I've always known: that there is darkness and there is light, and darkness can oppress us, follow us, and challenge us. And oh my, have I ever experienced that darkness, that heaviness. I have been seeped deep in that darkness during seasons of my life.

I had gone to a psychic fair feeling excited, expansive, and ready. I was proud of my recent personal growth and transformation, and I walked in hoping to sit down with a reader who would mirror that light back to me, shedding some insight on my future. Instead, the moment I sat down, I felt completely deregulated.

The reader did not look at me with warmth. Instead, she hit me with a long list of accusations. She criticized the way I stood, the way I held myself, and then she delivered a line meant to settle like lead in my chest: "Look at you. Your heart chakra is a tree stump."

It was a chilling statement, a weaponized metaphor meant to indicate complete and permanent deadness. By calling my heart chakra a tree stump, she was declaring that my core energy was something static, severed, and spent—something that would never, ever grow, expand, or bloom again.

It is a terrifying thing to have a heavy, absolutist judgment dropped into your space when you are vulnerable. For a moment, the room spun, and I felt a very familiar weight pulling me down—an oppressive, reducing force that has tried to keep me small for much of my life. It is a voice that accuses, condemns, and insists that you are an unchangeable, broken thing.

To be honest, it shook me. For a few days, I carried the sting of those words. I was struck by the cruelty of the interaction, and the old deregulation took time to clear. But this time, the timeline was different. In the past, a blow like that would have leveled me for months, sending me into a deep spiral of self-doubt and collapse. I would have quietly absorbed the curse, looked at myself, and believed that I was nothing but a dead stump.

This time, after just a few days of being shaken, something else kicked in. A quiet, stubborn discernment began to stir, followed by an incredible surge of my newfound strength and confidence. I was struck, yes, but not the way I would have been in the past. My recovery was rapid because I realized that you don’t need to prove exactly what spiritual or psychological force is operating through someone to know when a message is harmful and untrue.

The clue that a voice is not coming from a place of love and light is that it tells you things that are fundamentally, energetically impossible. Nobody in the universe has a heart space that is a dead tree stump.

A heart may be guarded.

A heart may be tired.

A heart may be wounded, hardened, neglected, or afraid.

It can be severely out of balance, atrophied, or cold.

But a living person does not carry a piece of unyielding, dead wood where their spirit is meant to breathe.

In that moment of clarity, I fully recognized the old darkness that had oppressed me for years, and I chose to argue back. It wasn't a moment of passive, polished enlightenment or quiet transcendence. It was a pivotal moment that made me feel I may be experiencing a spiritual ascension. I looked at that condemning narrative and said: You are full of shit. Flee from me. Take your lies to the pit of hell.

Looking back on that moment now, a profound sense of happiness and relief washes over me. The true victory wasn't just surviving the interaction; it was realizing how quickly I bounced back. For so long, I might have swallowed those words, letting them seed doubt in my recovery. But this experience proved that something fundamental has shifted inside me. I have cultivated a deep, unshakeable trust and faith in myself. I finally possess the self-belief required to protect my own narrative, to know my own truth, and to recognize a lie the moment it targets my worth.

That is the quiet grace captured in the photograph. The weathered stump does not need to be uprooted from the earth, dragged away, or thrown into the fire. It can remain exactly where it is.

In some ways, I am glad it does.

It reminds me of the lie. It reminds me of the depth of it, the intensity of it, the sheer audacity of someone looking a living human being in the eye, pointing to their chest, and pronouncing a life sentence of absolute stagnation. The stump stands there like evidence of an old accusation that no longer has authority over the landscape. I do not need to destroy it in order to prove that it was wrong. I can look directly at it and remember how deeply those words struck me, how familiar that condemning voice once felt, and how quickly something stronger rose up inside me this time to answer it.

The old injury belongs to the landscape now. It sits in the earth, static and still, while everything around it continues to live.

Moss grows over it.

Roots move beneath it.

Branches reach beyond it.

The living world does not deny that the dead wood is there. It simply refuses to take its instructions from it.

And the reality that healing and stubbornness have become for me is not about forgetting the lie. It is not pretending it never wounded me. It is not tearing every reminder of it from the earth. It is being able to stand right beside it, look directly at its cold, unmoving weight, and know the fiery truth of my own reality.

Because the ultimate absurdity of that lie is that my heart is not just surviving—it is in vibrant, uncontainable motion. My heart chakra energy is pounding, glowing, and sharing its light with the world. It is on fire with life, expanding in ways that a mind trapped in darkness could never comprehend.

So I can let the grey stump stay in the dirt where it belongs. I can stand next to it, fully alive, look at it and say:

Look how wrong you were.

And then keep burning.