The Old Madrone

More than twenty years ago, I rounded a bend on a little dirt road leading to the Jikoji Zen Buddhist Retreat and met the biggest madrone tree I had ever seen.

Come walk with me... Sometimes we don't realize we've made a lifelong friend until we've been visiting them for twenty years. This old madrone has watched me hurry past on countless hikes to the Jikoji Zen Center. Looking through old photographs, I realized she wasn't simply changing. She had quietly been teaching me something about love all along. When I started looking through thousands of photographs for this week's ThankU.io posts, I discovered something surprising. Not one or two tree photos, but more than 1,700 of them. I thought I was simply choosing pictures for this week's posts. Instead, I found old friends.

Each photograph marked a different season of my life, and together they told a story I hadn't recognized before. These trees weren't simply part of the landscape. They had quietly accompanied me through more than two decades of living in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The first photographs I found reminded me of our tenth anniversary. Instead of lounging by the pool on our cruise, Jim and I taped a giant flip chart to the cabin wall and planned the next ten years of our lives. Our daughter had just left for college, and we were dreaming about moving twenty minutes up the mountain road from our suburban home in Cupertino to a place that felt light years away in style and grace. At the top of my wish list were two simple words: redwood trees.

We eventually found this house, and growing beside the deck were three little redwoods. Looking back now, I realize I wasn't just photographing three little trees. I was photographing the beginning of a dream. Over the years, they have quietly grown taller than the house and been trimmed into an odd shape for wildfire protection, just as our life here has quietly grown into everything we hoped it might become.

Then I found photographs of the majestic old madrone that stands beside the dirt road leading down to the Jikoji Zen Buddhist Retreat. The first time I saw her, I was convinced she was going to fall on me. Her massive roots stretched across giant boulders, and even then part of her looked tired. Every time I hiked past, I hurried a little. Twenty years later, I still do. Looking at the photographs taken over the years, I watched more and more of her branches disappear. As I stood there last week, looking at her once again, one simple thought arrived: I never once loved her less.

Finally, I came across photographs from Big Basin after the CZU Fire. In August 2020, our mountain lived through weeks of smoke, evacuations, and uncertainty. We prayed for the ancient redwoods as the fire burned through the park we loved. When we finally returned in 2025, I expected to find a forest filled with loss. Instead, I found trunks covered with thousands of tiny green shoots. The great redwoods looked fuzzy from the ground almost to their tops. I later learned that coast redwoods are uniquely adapted to survive fire, but I didn't know that as I stood there. I only knew I was looking at hope.

As I laid these photographs side by side, I realized they weren't really about trees. One reminded me that dreams grow quietly. Another reminded me that love doesn't disappear just because something changes. The third reminded me that life begins again, even after fire.

Maybe that's why these trees feel less like scenery now and more like old friends. They've been walking beside me all along.

Come walk with me. We'll find the light.