We Willows have always had a strong connection to trees. We weren't born "Willow" - we chose that name for ourselves.
We remember being young and legally blind, and thinking trees were so much nicer to look at than flowers. Flowers were little blobs of color, but have you seen a spring blooming dogwood, all big and bold and white and pink? Even though we couldn't distinguish any branches, much less flowers, they were so wonderful to look at. And where flowers felt fragile and weak, trees felt safe and secure and strong.
We started tree climbing young, about seven years old. We climbed safe - we knew the rule, don't put your weight on any branch that bends more than a thumb length, never grab a limb thinner than your wrist. We were frequently dragged away from our books and sent outside to play. We had nothing and no one to play with and by seven felt too embarrassed to play make believe as that was only for "little kids" - so we climbed the tree in the backyard and daydreamed, and talked to the tree and imagined what it would say back. Pretending a conversation was okay, but pretending to be a pirate or whatnot was not. (Don't try to make sense of it, it's just how we thought.)
We saw Pocahontas around age 9. We really resonated with Grandmother Willow. It was partly a "I want someone like that in my life" and also a strong sense of "I want to be that person when I grow old." (Well, with our name change, we will!)
(As a teenager we laughed when our little sister declared she wanted to be Peter Pan when she grew up... :/)
We got glasses, finally, in eighth grade. (We had them very briefly in second grade but hated them.) One of the first sights that really astonished us was trees, especially when driving past and seeing how the view of it morphed as we passed.
We didn't discover the therian and otherkin community till we were in our 20s, and slowly came to understand ourselves - treehearted, willow dryadkin, forest spirit/spren.
One of our ways we combat anxiety and decrease the pain we feel from our physical health conditions is to "root" ourselves in our imagined tree form. (Pun fully intended.) We envision the tree of us extending past our physical form, branches starting at our shoulders, roots going down past our feet, or, if we're sitting cross egged, through our legs. As we breathe in, we envision energy flowing into us from the earth, rising up through our body/trunk and into our branches, and as we breathe out we let that energy leave out through our branches and arms and head.
It's grounding and centering and relaxing and beautiful.
I don't really have a point to writing this, nowhere to go with it. Just sharing, just being.
Be what you can't not be.
Do what you can't not do.
