A JOURNEY OF GRIT, GROWTH, and GRACE
THE BERBLY PROJECT
Following Life’s Branches Back to Their Roots
The tree was barely taller than my forearm the day I carried it home.
Calling it a tree at all is probably an overreach. A thin trunk. Branches somehow more delicate still, so sparse they looked embarrassed to call themselves branches. The needles were spaced so dramatically it seemed the seedling hadn’t yet decided whether it wanted to grow up to become a real tree one day.
It was what my small donation to the elementary school’s Earth Day event had earned me.
I loved it the way some people fall for giant red flags. Immediately and completely.
My dad asked where I wanted to plant it. The answer escaped my lips without so much as a stutter.
“Outside my bedroom window.”
As a kid, I spent hours at that window. And I believed so much in this little seedling.
If it was going to grow into a tree one day, I wanted to see it…
…I wanted to watch it grow.
Every morning before school. Every evening before bed.
Every thunderstorm, every snowfall…
Every summer evening when the sun stayed out just a little longer than it was supposed to.
So that’s exactly where it went.
I watched birds choose the branches they trusted enough to build on.
I watched snow settle across the needles.
I watched storms bend those branches so far back that I was certain they would break.
They never did.
I don’t remember the day the seedling stopped being a seedling. I don’t remember when I stopped believing it needed my protection.
Stand beside something long enough, and you never get far enough away to watch it change.
I only remember looking up, on a day like any other, and finding a tree where my seedling had once been.
Branches stretching far above the roofline. Its shade across the whole yard. Its needles brushing parts of the sky I’d once been certain belonged only to birds.
What had once looked like something out of A Charlie Brown Christmas, as small and vulnerable as the little girl who buried its roots… had become a tree on steroids.
Nobody really thought it would amount to much.
But it didn’t care…
…it grew anyway.
Which is how I ended up standing in that yard years later, listening to my dad—judge, jury, and executioner—deliver a verdict with the quiet certainty of a man who had already decided.
“The tree has to come down.”
I stood there watching the entire life of that once-defenseless little seedling flash before my eyes, years packed into seconds, trying to understand why something so beautiful ultimately had to face destruction. And how I had never, not even once, seen it coming.
My dad couldn’t see the roots any better than I could from my bedroom window. He just knew they were there. He knew enough about trees to know that what threatened the house was never the part reaching for the sky.
It was the part moving. Growing slowly… quietly.
The part that was the least obvious, because it was the part we couldn’t see.
If those roots were anything like what we could see above ground, even a tree amateur could take a stab at what was happening underground without ever breaking the dirt with a shovel.
The roots hadn’t broken through the foundation yet.
There was no dramatic crack splitting the house in two.
And that was precisely the point.By the time the damage would’ve become visible, the roots would already have done the work.
The roots were quiet. But quiet did not mean harmless.
Every day they went unaddressed, they grew stronger beneath the house, threatening its foundation without ever announcing themselves.
Effortlessly. Unapologetically.
As a little girl, I’d asked for growth, but I never thought to ask whether the place I’d chosen for it could survive the kind of growth the seedling had in mind.
My first mistake?
Using the other trees in the yard as a baseline measurement.
Because this was no ordinary tree.
Lucky for my dad, by then I was an adult, which spared him from having to apologize to a teary-eyed little girl who’d once been excited just to watch it grow.
Children mistake what’s visible for what matters.
Adults do it a lot of the time, too.The more life I’ve lived, the more I’ve found myself drawn to the parts nobody’s looking at:
The roots beneath the tree. The story beneath the story.
The fear beneath the anger. The grief beneath the silence.The belief beneath the decision.
Not because I’m hunting for darkness, and not because I think something’s always wrong. Because the roots are the architecture—they hold up everything we think we already understand.
Branches tell you what something became.
Roots tell you why.
Eventually I stopped watching the world through my bedroom window and started seeing it the way my father had.
I didn’t stop noticing the branches.
They never became less important to me. I just got less willing to walk away from them without understanding them first.
That’s not to say I’m returning to the same places hoping the answers have changed.
It’s about returning with better questions.
The facts are rarely what move. What actually moves is you.
Writing is how I slow life down long enough to look at it. Examine it. Analyze the hell out of it.
What began as a place to put thoughts that had become too heavy to carry stopped feeling temporary somewhere along the way.
It became the place I go to make sense of the things too important to forget and too unfinished to explain.
A place where loose threads get followed instead of ignored.
Where hard questions are allowed to remain unanswered for as long as they need to.
Where discomfort isn’t treated as a reason to stop digging, but as evidence that I may finally be getting close to the roots.
Every story here starts with something ordinary.
A conversation. A race. A financial decision. A diagnosis. A memory.
Most of them end somewhere I didn’t expect—grief, family, resilience, or a moment that meant nothing at all until years later.
Every one of them begins with something visible, just like a seedling outside a little girl’s window.Almost none of them end there.
The roots grow quietly and patiently beneath the surface.
Waiting for someone to come along who’s willing to start digging.
So that’s what I do here… I dig.
And in my experience…
the roots are always where the real story begins.
– welcome to –
THE BERBLY PROJECT