The Fruit of Remembering

In January 2023, about two months after we returned home from Matías De Stefano’s planetary task in ERKS, Argentina, something in me had shifted. I couldn’t explain it in words. The experience didn’t end when we came home — it stayed in my body like a pulse that was still echoing. I thought I was coming home to my normal life, to my work as a Registered Nurse and the everyday rhythm of bills and responsibilities, but something in me had remained there.

I love to exercise, and I spend a lot of time at a hot yoga studio. The hot yoga has replaced my sweat-lodge practice, which is where I first learned meditation. In yoga I move and breathe, and sometimes my body releases old memories. I don’t experience them first as thoughts, but as sensations — nausea or a kind of pain that rises up from somewhere deep. When that feeling comes, I ask my body to show me what it is. I ask without expectation and allow the answer to come in its own time. I rest my attention on the sensation and gently ask, “When did you first begin?”

One time the answer came in a dream.

I was three years old, standing in a potato field during harvest. Dust and dirt blew across the open ground. I could see my mother’s truck far away in the distance — so far away. My older sister and I had been playing, and then I became aware that I felt miserable.

My diaper was soaked and cold against my skin.

My tears carved lines down my dusty cheeks.

My thumb was cracked and sore and could no longer comfort me.

I stood there crying and wanting my mother, feeling completely alone in that wide open field.

And in that small moment, something settled into me.

It was disgust.

A deep rejection of the body I was in.

Then time layered itself.

Five.

Twelve.

Seventeen.

Twenty-one.

Different ages. Same feeling.

The pattern had echoed through the

years — a quiet shame toward my own physical form.

In vision, I turned toward the littlest

one — my three-year-old self — and I picked her up.

“You don’t have to carry this anymore,”

I whispered.

“We’re older now. You’re safe.”

But words were not enough.

Something in me wanted to play.

So I tossed her gently into the air.

She giggled.

Then the five-year-old joined.

The twelve-year-old.

The seventeen-year-old.

All of us formed a circle.

We lifted the smallest one together — catching her, tossing her again — over and over, in delight.

All of me laughing.

Our bodies began to merge — aligning into one form. I felt my arms multiply, reaching outward like branches.

Again we lifted her.

And suddenly —

I was a tree.

Rooted. Expansive. Alive.

Arms like limbs stretching toward the sky.

We caught her together, holding her in one embrace.

And she laughed with the pure joy of a child unburdened.

I physically laughed out loud.

Then the vision shifted.

I was standing at a distance, looking at a tree.

Majestic. Radiant.

The Tree of Life.

Its branches bore glowing fruit. The air shimmered around it like living light.

My heart pounded — not with fear, but awe.

And I understood something without needing to name it.

The Tree of Life appears in every story because it lives within us.

A quiet knowing rose:

If you are standing before it… step forward.

So I did.

I reached up and picked a piece of fruit. It glowed white in my hand.

I took a bite.

There was no taste.

But every cell in my body awakened.

From the soles of my feet

to the crown of my head —

joy.

Every cell singing together:

I love being me.

I love being me.

I love being me.

Not just the woman I am now.

But the three-year-old.

The five-year-old.

The twelve-year-old.

Every version of me who had once felt shame.

The story reversed.

From rejection

to radiance.

From shame

to sovereignty.

From “I hate being in this body”

to “I love being me.”

And I laughed.

When we traveled to Egypt, I did not know what we were stepping into.

Only later did I begin to understand that some journeys initiate us long before we comprehend them.

This vision did not feel random.

It felt like integration.

Like something ancient had been touched — and something within me had finally rooted.

Healing did not erase the memory.

It transformed it.

The body I once rejected became the tree that bore fruit.

Memory turned to light.