Family Like Tree Rings

Well this setting has more to do with stones than with wood. There Are many more stones, still laying in the shape of a foundation, than there are pieces of timber. Stones are plentiful here. The builder would shape them so they would stack upon one another.

What caught my eye however were the few pieces of wood that were strewn about. In a documentary about the vikings, certain technology was used to determine the age of building materials used to make a viking long ship. They were simply able to take a core sample of the old wood, place it along an historical time line, set it inside a spectrum of tree rings that goes back thousands of years, and quite accurately determine when that ship was constructed. I wondered therefore, how old this building site was. I think the answer is easier than going through all that. The locals here know more about our family history than I do.

Do you know how tree rings are created? They have to do with the speed in which a tree grows from season to season, and from year to year. So, in the winter months a tree will grow much slower than in the summer months, and when it's observed in a sample of wood, the denser and darker rings will represent the times of slower growth. Warm winters will have lighter or thinner rings I think, and so even different varieties of trees will share a common pattern, which helps scientists to put together the time line.

In families, time lines are called family trees, or geneagrams. I wonder if tree rings could be used as a metaphor for how an individual can study her or his family. Times of rapid change versus times of more static existence. Yet, it is the same tree and the softer and harder times are all in relationship with one another. For example, when my grandfather moved to the U.S. in 1925, that began a time of rapid change for the family! Soon, new young shoots were coming up in another part of the world, and although old patterns of functioning will continue (and it will be interesting to continue to think about what those patterns are), there are many new influences to the family, influences that impact the system in ways that would be difficult to understand let alone observe. Over time, one half of grandpa's family of origin moved to North America.

Family like tree rings. There might be something to that metaphor.