I found a bench in the sun and waited for my friend to walk the labyrinth. I had walked it first and wanted to give her time alone in it. Once she finished, she sat on a bench across from me, and we shared our experiences, which in the same labyrinth were very different from each other’s.
There were large, barren trees in a ring around us. I wasn’t paying much attention to them but my friend commented on the one behind me, whose crooked branch I was sitting under. She had been quietly assessing if it was a dead branch and the likelihood of it falling on my head. But then she noticed very small buds on the tree and realized it was safer than it looked. She said,
“You really have to look hard for life.”