The Treehouse in April

Embracing the Wood phase in spring, a neighbor’s treehouse on the West Side Trail, and what the bare branches let us see

Adults who keep calendars and manage obligations will travel across the world to sleep in trees. My father built us a treehouse once, and this week I ran past one that had been there all along, invisible until April opened the branches. The Wood element of Chinese medicine says the trouble is never growth itself. The trouble is an inability to bend.

Spring trees at the edge of color, the moment before the canopy fills in.

I spotted the treehouse while running along the West Side Trail on Cousins Island this week. It belongs to a neighbor’s child. I’ve no doubt passed it dozens of times and barely registered it, hidden as it typically is by a full canopy of oak and maple. In mid-April the leaves are still forming here in Maine, and the structure sat plainly visible against the grey sky: plywood platform, a railing, a wooden ladder. Nothing about it appeared to have changed recently. The branches had simply not yet filled in enough to hide it.

Or maybe I was just ready to see it that day.

When I was young, my father built us a similar treehouse. He was a family physician for nearly fifty years, and on weekends he worked with his hands: lumber, tools, the physical work of building something a child could climb. There is a photograph of all ten of us lined up in the treehouse, arranged along the railing, taken from below. We may have used it for the Christmas card that year.

I remember the plywood floor, the way it smelled like sawdust and rain. I would climb up with a book and sit with the birds in the branches around me, calling out to one another in coded refrains.

Stories passed between us, with and without words, high above the ordinary world.

Island Trees by Jane Dahmen

The element that bends

According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, spring belongs to the Wood element. Wood governs growth, vision, and the capacity to push upward and outward after months of stillness. It is the energy of a plan forming, a shoot pressing through cold soil, and a branch extending toward light it has not yet reached.

The trouble with Wood is not growth itself. The trouble is an inability to bend.

I tell my patients a version of this: picture a tree in a hurricane. A tree of moderate size, rooted well, with enough flexibility in its trunk to move with the wind, will hold its ground. The storm passes. The tree is still standing. A tree that has grown too large or become too fixed in its own architecture may snap in half. The break happens not because the storm is stronger than the tree, but because the tree has lost the capacity to flex.

We carry this in our bodies. In the muscles along the sides of the ribs, in the tendons of the hips, in the jaw we clench without noticing. The Wood element, when it flows, gives us direction and the steady force that moves a season forward. When it stagnates, we feel stuck, irritable, brittle in places we used to bend.

We built the Bountiful Path Spring Seasonal Reflection Toolkit around this idea. The Wood phase invites us to notice where we are growing freely and where we have stopped flexing. Where we are reaching toward something new and where we are gripping what no longer serves. The toolkit walks through this in detail, one question at a time, because the body often knows before the mind does.

Growth is not the problem. The trouble is an inability to bend.

Standing Like a Tree by Carlos Gamez de Francisco

---

---

The view from higher up

A tree, of course, does more than grow. It is rooted in soil and reaches toward open sky. It interacts with every element in the natural world: the water that feeds it, the fire of sunlight that drives its chemistry, the earth that holds it, the metal of minerals drawn up through its roots. It is home to birds, insects, squirrels, the occasional child with a book. It is also the place where humans climb to see things differently.

During our Artful Escapes event last fall, my co-host shared photographs from a resort built entirely in the trees. He and his partner had stayed in one of the sky-bourne dwellings. His images showed structures nestled amidst large branches, connected by walkways and ladders.

Adults who have built entire professional lives, who keep calendars and manage obligations, will travel across the world to sleep in trees.

The plywood floor. The shift in perspective when the ground drops away by ten or twelve feet and the familiar landscape rearranges. The sound of wind in branches without a wall between you and it. We will go a long way to get back to this.

We travel to distant places to stay in houses that return us to where we started.

Beyond the Trees by William Crosby

What the bare branches reveal

On Littlejohn Island this week, the buds are swelling on the oaks. They are not yet open. The treehouse I passed on my run will disappear again in a few weeks, folded into green, invisible from the trail. For now, in this particular window of April, the bare branches have made it plain.

The spring that arrived in Virginia as dogwood and cherry blossoms is still working its way north. The ground is soft. The light is longer. The Wood element is doing what it does: pressing upward, reaching outward, testing flexibility as it goes.

Shel Silverstein’s tree gave everything it had and remained rooted. Wood gives itself away and remains standing.

My father, who built the treehouse that held ten children and a Christmas card, understood this. He spent his weekdays listening to patients and his weekends building things with his hands. He knew that the strongest structures are the ones that give a little. That roots matter more than height. That sometimes the best use of a Saturday is to build a platform twelve feet off the ground and let your children see the world from there.

The best view is earned by climbing. The safest perch is the one that sways.

The treehouse on the West Side Trail is still visible this week. The leaves will come. The canopy will close. In the meantime, the structure sits in plain sight, waiting for the child who knows the way up.

Pause + Reflect:

What did you see differently from up high as a child, and where do you go now when you need that shift in perspective?

May we grow and remain flexible. May we keep climbing to see the familiar from a new height. May we build platforms for the people who come after us, and trust that the branches will hold.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

If you are nearby this evening (April 16), we hope you will join us for Radio Maine Live: Emergence and Light at the Portland Art Gallery. 5:00–7:00 pm. Free and open to the public

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

---

More from The Bountiful Path

Featured on Radio Maine: Victoria Zurkan — on art as a portal to the unconscious.

Bountiful Path Solo Reflection: Wayfinding — on how we move through uncertainty.

Off the Wall: Light That Endures — Maine artist Julie Houck paints the fleeting light in landscapes that balance precision with emotion.

From the archive: Growing Community — Chef Justin Walker and the farm-to-table community around Walkers Maine in Cape Neddick.

Continue on The Bountiful Path: The Hen and the Chick — On spring arrivals, and what our children already understand.