> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Resin
- URL: https://soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io/resin/
- Published: 2026-08-28T16:24:40.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-08T07:54:55.000Z
- Description: Resin is a short piece about how a cherry tree knows, how a robin knows. Everything living is trying, in its own way, to help everything else survive.
- Author: Andrea Robertson-Begg
- Tags: resilience, colostomy, netzero, National Emergency Briefing, holistic healing, climate change

**What an old cherry tree taught me about wounds, water and attention**

This summer has been glorious and dreadful in equal measure. In England we had one of the hottest days of the year, and I spent it seeking out deep shade.

Glorious, partly because sunlight still performs its familiar magic. After months of grey skies, flooding and winter restraint, the light returns and something primal resurfaces. My body stretches towards it like a cat sunbathing on the brightest window ledge in the house. My spirit lifts. My thoughts settle. The garden becomes both sanctuary and companion.

Dreadful, because heat and I are no longer easy friends.

Since the emergency surgery that changed my body, I have had to negotiate temperature differently. Heat is no longer something I simply experience. It is something I manage and slightly fear. Something I monitor. Something capable of turning from friend to adversary with alarming speed.

As I wrote in *Heat*, there are days when surviving hot weather becomes a full time occupation. Days when the house becomes a beast, swallowing sunlight into its brickwork and refusing to release it long after darkness has fallen. Days when the body spends more energy regulating itself than it does living. Days when I drink before thirst asks, the way I water the garden before it visibly suffers.

So, whilst others sought the sun, I retreated beneath the cherry tree.

She was already a substantial tree when I first met her over thirty years ago. How old she is now, I cannot say. Forty perhaps, maybe fifty. Old enough to have become woven into the architecture of my garden and my life.

Every spring she unfurls clouds of delicate cream blossom. Not simply flowers, but a kind of transient memory made visible. Pale confetti suspended briefly between earth and sky before surrendering to gravity and time.

Her branches are twisted and arthritic with age. Her leaves drape downwards in soft green curtains. Beneath her canopy exists a different climate entirely. Cooler. Kinder. Softer around the edges. Many of my more delicate plants owe their survival to her generosity, this year more than ever.

The garden has suffered under weeks of relentless heat. The soil has turned brick hard, pale and exhausted. The lawn crackles underfoot. Even the weeds seem to have lost their enthusiasm.

Yet the cherry tree remained. Steady. Watchful. A familiar guardian holding her position whilst the world baked around her.

We have shared much, this tree and I.

When my first cat was put to sleep beneath her branches, she released a shower of blossom around us. At the time it felt as though the tree herself had joined the vigil. He was a white and ginger stray who had adopted me with the confidence of someone taking possession of property already rightfully theirs. Independent. Strong. Wilful. Entirely resistant to the notion that he required anybody. Particularly me.

And yet there we were, bound together despite his sustained efforts to suggest otherwise.

I remember kneeling beside him beneath the blossom, holding the weight of grief and gratitude at once. Petals settling silently onto his fur, onto the grass, onto my shoulders. The cherry tree witnessed all of it, as if crying with me. I did not know that such afternoons would one day become my work. I only knew that he should not be alone, and that I should not be elsewhere.

Years later she appeared again, not in grief this time, but in celebration. I had photographed her endlessly over the decades, fascinated by the way light moved through her leaves and blossom, and one of those photographs eventually found its way onto my wedding invitations, and onto every thank you card. Each one made individually for every guest. A labour of love and gratitude.

Without realising it, I had invited the cherry tree to the wedding too.

Perhaps that is what old trees become. Witnesses. Living archives. Keepers of stories nobody else remembers.

It was during that unbearable afternoon, beneath her shade that I noticed the light behaving strangely. At first, I thought sunlight had become trapped in a spider's web. Something golden shimmered amongst the branches. An unexpected glint. A small disturbance in the familiar.

I stood and moved closer.

The sunlight had not become trapped at all. It had become liquid. Amber droplets clung to the bark. Some hung motionless, like tiny lanterns suspended from the branch. Others had begun their slow journey downwards, tracing translucent pathways across the trunk before dripping onto the plants beneath. Everything below her was dusted with liquid gold. Leaves glistened. Stems shimmered. The afternoon sun caught each droplet and turned it into a small jewel.

It was beautiful. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

I stood for a long time looking at it. The resin looked less like sap and more like tears. Not tears as humans cry them. Something older. Something slower. The tree appeared to be bleeding sunlight.

Ancient cultures treasured resin. They burned it in temples, offered it in ritual, carried its fragrance into prayer. Resin emerges from wounds, and yet somehow transforms injury into something precious. A tree suffers damage. The wound opens. And from that opening emerges gold.

I thought about that for a long time. The paradox of it. How often healing and suffering emerge through the same doorway. How often light enters through the fracture.

The resin glowed in the heat, a visible expression of something hidden. A wound translated into a language I could understand.

The sight carried me back to the first time I ever coated my violin bow with resin. I remember the soft dust filling the air, hanging in the light, as though the bow and I were exhaling and inhaling with each stroke. I worked from tip to toe, slowly, methodically, as careful as someone tending a fragile wound, covering the fine horsehairs strand by strand until every hair carried its faint golden dusting. Then I drew the bow across the strings, and the violin woke beneath my chin. The tone deepened. The resonance grew richer. The strings gave their notes back with an ease the instrument had not offered me before. It felt like a small anointment.

We do not often call that healing. Yet that is what it is. A quiet, regular tending that keeps a voice alive. The tree offers resin after the wound. The bow asks for it before the music. A cry. A request. Both are forms of attention.

And suddenly I felt terribly sad, because I realised that after decades of looking after me, the cherry tree was asking for help. For years she had sheltered me from rain and sun, cradled fragile plants beneath her branches, held memories too precious for photographs. And now, during one of the hottest summers I can remember, she was communicating her own distress. Not with words. Not with drama. Not with accusation. Simply through amber tears. A slow golden telegram sent from root to branch. A message written in resin.

The longer I stood there, the more familiar the language became.

My own body had spoken to me in exactly the same way. Not through resin, but through symptoms. A niggling pain. An ache. A disturbance. A whisper. Small signals appearing long before the catastrophe arrived, even in ordinary meetings, sitting huddled over a laptop screen. My own golden warning lights, leaking quietly through the bark of everyday life.

At the time I did not understand the language. Or perhaps I understood it perfectly and chose not to listen. Like many people, I believed there would always be time later. Later to rest. Later to investigate. Later to pay attention.

Later became a rupture. The rupture became emergency surgery. And what followed became one of the most demanding and generous teachers I have ever known.

The strange thing about suffering is that it rearranges vision. Before, I often looked. After, I learned to see. There is a difference. The same difference that allows someone, deep into the long wait of a hospital afternoon, to finally notice a poster flapping beneath the fan. The same difference that reveals the private burdens carried by carers sitting quietly beside the people they love. The same difference that allows a patch of resin on an old tree to become something far greater than botanical curiosity.

Suffering translated me.

The tree and I had arrived at the same lesson by different roads. Neither of us had escaped wounding. Both of us carried the evidence of it. And both of us remained standing.

Eventually I fetched the watering can. Then another. And another. The ground beneath the tree had separated from itself, great cracks running through the soil like fault lines on an ancient map. The earth drank greedily, swallowing each offering almost before the next arrived. The water disappeared so quickly it seemed impossible it could ever be enough.

I had been too late for my own body. I was not too late for her.

Yet I kept going. Can after can. Until the soil darkened. Until the scent of damp earth began to rise. Until life started answering.

A robin appeared, almost immediately, as though he had been watching from somewhere nearby, waiting for precisely this invitation. He landed beside me and began his peculiar dance. Hop. Pause. Tilt of the head. Hop again. Listening. Watching. Reading the soil. Within moments he had pulled a worm from the newly softened ground. Then another.

The robin understood before I did. The water had not simply reached the roots of the tree. It had woken an entire conversation beneath the surface. Worms rose. Birds fed. The soil softened. The tree drank. Life responding to care.

I stood quietly watching him and found myself wondering whether this is the lesson most of us spend our lives learning. Nature rarely waits until the very last moment. Yet humans almost always do. We postpone difficult conversations. Ignore symptoms. Dismiss exhaustion. Delay grief. Push through pain. We leave important decisions until circumstances remove every other option.

Until the rupture. Until the diagnosis. Until the fire. Until the loss. Until the resin begins to flow.

And yet the signals are almost always there. A tree bleeding sunlight. A body whispering discomfort. An anxious friend. An exhausted carer. A wilting plant. A frightened animal. Life speaking continuously in a thousand subtle dialects. The message is rarely hidden. Only overlooked.

As evening finally arrived and the temperature loosened its grip, I sat once more beneath the cherry tree. The robin had disappeared into the hedge. The soil rested dark and cool around her roots. Above me, the branches moved gently in the breeze. The resin still glowed in the fading light, amber against ancient bark.

A wound made visible. A request answered. A conversation between living things.

And the question came the way evening comes, slowly and without announcement. Perhaps this is what we are really here to learn? Not mastery. Not achievement. Not even survival. But attention. The ability to recognise suffering before it becomes catastrophe. To notice the resin. To understand the language. To water the roots.

Because the cherry tree knows. The robin knows. My body knows. Everything living is trying, in its own way, to help everything else survive.

We are not separate enough to ignore one another. Not really.

Like sunlight held within resin. Like blossom carried upon the wind. Like roots sharing water beneath the surface, we belong to each other.

All rights reserved © Soul Harbor Therapies, Andrea Robertson-Begg August 2026