Growing Old with a Willow Tree

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Growing Old with a Willow Tree

It began with a caterpillar.

A small, yellow-green creature crawling across the wood in front of me. Unknown to both of us. Still, I thought it looked like a caterpillar I had seen before—one of those that occasionally drops down on me when I lie in the hammock beneath the willow tree.

That was how my thoughts began to move from the caterpillar to the tree.

The willow was planted by my father-in-law in 1964. At the time, it was hardly more than a twig. A small branch placed in the ground. The twig took root. It grew leaves and began to grow.

My wife was a child then. She watched the tree grow.

Later, we had children of our own. When we visited her parents, a swing hung from one of the branches. Our three children swung there. They kicked their legs back and forth beneath the crown, as children do, without thinking that one day they themselves would be grown.

Now they are adults.

And our four grandchildren have swung from the same tree.

It is difficult to regard such a tree as merely a tree.

It stands there with more than sixty years of lived life around it. Not only its own life, but ours. Year after year has settled into the bark, the branches, the soil around the trunk. Children have become adults. Adults have grown old. People have come and gone. The tree has remained.

But the tree, too, is growing old.

It loses branches. Bark falls away. Some of the long, soft branches dry out and have to be removed. After storms, twigs lie scattered on the ground. The crown is no longer what it once was.

And yet it is full of life.

Birds sit in the branches. Insects find shelter in the bark. Caterpillars live among the leaves. Over all these years, many young birds must have hatched and been raised among the branches. Some of them may have taken their first wingbeats from this very tree.

An old tree can be full of new life.

It is easy to think of ageing as a gradual diminishment. Something grows weaker. Something disappears. The body tolerates less. Movements become slower. Things that once came naturally demand more attention.

So it is with the willow tree as well.

But when I look at it, decline is not the first thing I see.

I see the shade.

I see the hammock beneath the branches.

I see the children swinging there.

I see the grandchildren.

I see the birds.

And I see the little caterpillar.

Perhaps there is something here that we human beings find difficult to understand. A life need not be judged by how strong, productive, or flawless it is. An old tree is not a poorer tree simply because its branches break more easily than they once did.

It has simply grown old.

And it should be allowed to grow old.

We have decided that the willow will remain standing for as long as it can. We remove branches that may be dangerous, but the tree will not be cut down merely because it no longer looks as it did when our children were small.

It should be allowed to live out its life.

I feel that this decision is about more than a tree.

Perhaps it is also about how we look at our own lives.

We live in a time that places great value on the new. The young. The efficient. What works. We repair, improve, and replace. When something is worn, we buy something new.

But some things cannot be replaced.

Not because they are perfect, but because time has become attached to them.

The most important things in life we must hold close to us.

Even a willow tree.

For this tree represents something that cannot simply be bought again. It represents time. The road. Safety. Peace. Health. The joy of life.

Not because the tree has given us all these things, but because it has been there while life happened.

Arne Næss tried to put words to something like this through his idea of the ecological self—a self that does not end at the skin, but expands through its belonging to the living world. Perhaps that is why an old willow tree can become part of who we are. Not because we make the tree human, but because the boundary between our lives and the life around us is not always as sharp as we imagine.

Perhaps this is how belonging comes into being. Not as a great decision, but slowly. A place becomes ours because we have lived there. A chair becomes ours because we have sat in it a thousand times. A path becomes ours because our feet know every turn.

And a tree becomes ours because our lives have grown together with it.

Now we ourselves live here.

I can lie in the hammock beneath the branches and watch the light move through the leaves. The tree creaks softly when the wind comes. A bird moves from one branch to another. From time to time, something falls.

A leaf.

A small twig.

Or a caterpillar.

I have no need to turn the willow tree into a grand metaphor. It does not have to mean anything other than what it is.

But perhaps that is precisely why it means so much.

It stands there.

It grew while we were growing.

It ages while we age.

And perhaps there is a kind of peace in being able to say this without sorrow:

We have grown old together.

One day, the tree will fall.

One day, we too will disappear.