Do we only have value when we directly contribute to something or someone? Does our value diminish if we are not tangibly delivering anything in the moment?
I have been battling with worthiness for years. When I was in a leadership position at the university, that part of myself that needed validation and needed to earn love was mostly satisfied. Students looked up to me. Teachers depended on me. It felt like I mattered. Every time I was asked what I do, I proudly announced it because I always witnessed the respect in return.
Imagine leaving this space after a decade there and everything else crumbling- home, stability, connections, and my own worth attached to that identity.
It took me a year of consistent healing to not get upset when I encountered the subject. That part of me was raw and vulnerable. Who was I without being the creator, the educator, and the leader of that program? The summer program with international students was an especially sensitive subject for me. I poured my love and creativity into it in the years prior, and its original design was dear to my soul. Imagine my discomfort when I was quickly replaced by another instructor although the framework remained the same. I was asking about their performance, secretly hoping to affirm that I am irreplaceable.
It was painful to witness the flow of life in that space where everyone else remained but me. I quickly realized that I have to detach my reason for existence from these spaces and places. My worthiness is intrinsic and not dependent on accomplishments and accolades.
This past weekend, I walked through a forest trail and learned that the pin cherry tree, also called the fire cherry or bird cherry, drops seed pits that remain dormant and viable in the soil's seed bank for 50 to 100 years. These buried seeds wait for a major forest disturbance, like a fire or clear-cutting, to finally sprout when sunlight hits the forest floor. The hard outer pits protect the inner seed from decay and environmental damage for decades. The buried seeds only break dormancy and germinate when a disturbance opens the canopy and warms the soil.
It immediately dawned on me that the pin cherry tree has a delayed value, but it does. No one acknowledges it for these 50 to 100 years, but it continues with its mission to be potentially needed in some years ahead.
We humans struggle with that notion. We desire to be seen, heard, and recognized day in and day out. We feed on that recognition instead of quietly carrying our gift into the world of earthly matters. What would it take for our existence not to depend on what we produce and deliver in this lifetime? Each of us carries something that does not need to be immediately useful in order to be meaningful. Unfortunately, our culture rewards tangible and immediate results. The ones whose effects ripple into the future are often overlooked and neglected.
Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime, for the equivalent of roughly $109. He produced over 2,000 works in just over a decade, and popular recognition of his work only began around 1910, twenty years after his death. Emily Dickinson published fewer than a dozen poems during her life, and those were heavily edited. Today she's regarded as a poetic genius with nearly 1,800 poems to her name. Melville, Bach, Nick Drake, Vivian Maier, each made work of real, undeniable value while the world simply wasn't ready to see it yet.
That is why the pin cherry stopped me with fascination. I recognized something in it. There have been seasons of my own life when I have felt unseen, unneeded, uncertain whether what I carried still had any value, but dormancy is not the same as disappearance. Being unseen is not the same as being without purpose.
When the workshop has no registrations and the email goes unanswered, and when I find myself doubting that what I'm building matters, I am trying to remember the pin cherry. Some things are not meant to bloom on demand. Some gifts need to remain quietly alive beneath the surface until the conditions change.
Their value was never in question. Only the timing.
