What the Willow Gives On grief, violation, and the stubborn generosity of Willow

Fellow Seekers-

There is a way that Willow loves — extravagantly, without attachment to form. They drop their branches in windstorms not as defeat but as offering. What falls becomes what is planted. What is lost becomes what arrives, weeks later, in someone else's hands, wrapped in damp cloth or nestled between newsprint, small and alive.

But the shredding I am holding this week was not a storm. It was the city.

A beloved Willow in a City park— a tree known, tended, loved — was cut back in the name of maintenance. What was done to them was not pruning. It was a hack job, aggressive and careless, the kind that leaves a living being looking violated: downed branches heaped at their own base, the canopy brutalized, the tree standing in the wreckage of themselves. My friend, who loves this Willow, had to witness it. Had to absorb the particular grief of institutional harm — the kind that arrives with paperwork and equipment and the complete absence of relationship.

This is what happens when a tree is not recognized as kin. They become infrastructure. A liability. Something to be managed on a schedule, by someone who has never learned the tree.

Last week I sat on the back of a houseboat docked on Mni Sota Wakpá, my fingers pinching dandelion petals for wine, the current moving underneath us like a slow conversation. Before I left, my friend pressed a few willow twigs into my hands. Cuttings taken from the downed branches. From the violation itself. They had looked at that scene of harm and thought first of continuation — not replacement, never replacement — but of what the Willow might still become, offered forward into new ground.

I carried them home and pressed their ends into soil.

This is what Willow teaches, again and again, even in the face of human carelessness: grief and propagation are not opposites. They are the same motion, seen from different ends of the season. The shredding is the gift — not because the harm was acceptable, but because Willow refuses to let harm have the final word. They root from almost any cutting, from a branch dragged to the river's edge, from the smallest slip of themselves given to wet ground. They are almost aggressively generous with their own continuation.

What moved me, what I keep returning to, is the contrast: the city's relationship to that tree, and my friend's. The city saw a maintenance problem. My friend saw a beloved, saw grief, saw potential. One left branches rotting at the base. The other pressed cuttings into my hands at the edge of the Mississippi.

Two completely different ways of being in the world. Two completely different answers to the question: what is a tree?

The cuttings are in the ground now. I visit them. I do not know yet which ones will take. But I trust the instruction Willow carries in their cells — the ancient, generous, stubborn insistence on continuation. And I hold, alongside that trust, the truth that the harm was real. That the tree was violated. That my friend's grief was warranted. Gratitude for the cuttings does not require me to soften what caused them.

Stay wild and true,
Emily

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Services provided by Emily Grendahl Risinger and Still Wild Healing LLC are for educational purposes only. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classifies herbs as dietary supplements/food products, not medicines. Consult your healthcare provider before using any herbal supplements, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, have a medical condition, or take medications.