A SMALL TREE grows near the parking lot at a state park close to my home. I noticed this tree more than a decade ago when our children were very small: A sapling rooted in the crack of a giant boulder.
Over the past 14 years the split in the boulder has widened. As the tree has gotten a little taller and broader, the rock has gradually changed its shape, splitting and cracking. The tree’s bark folds around the rock; the two have become inextricably bound up with one another.
Social transformation can be slow, quiet work, like roots pushing their way through rock. It’s often hard to see the impact your life, your work, your presence, your art, your words are making on the impenetrable forces around you. Ask me to move a two-ton rock and I’ll laugh in your face; it’s impossible. And yet, I remember that little tree.
Extremely heavy forces are at work in this world: racism, misogyny, greed, violence. And yet people keep finding ways — like that tree growing down into stone — to stay rooted, find joy, grow, even thrive. What if the response to these very real and very heavy stones threatening to crush our humanity is not a sledgehammer but a sprout?
Jesus said if you have faith the size of a mustard seed you can make a mountain move. Perhaps the mustard seed needs to be planted first, to take root and gradually split rock, as it grows toward the light.
No Other Land, winner of the 2025 Academy Award for best documentary, chronicles ongoing attempts by the Israel Defense Force and vigilante settlers to uproot and displace people from Masafer Yatta, a string of villages in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The camera rolls as bulldozers crush houses and tear apart a school. Even as the residents of Masafer Yatta are cut off from access to clean water, a basic human right, they rebuild, shelter in caves, and refuse to leave.
“Aren’t you ashamed?” a forcibly displaced woman screams at a soldier who is evicting her from her home. “Aren’t you afraid of God?” she pleads. But the soldiers and settlers continue their encroachment. Even one of the co-directors, Hamdan Billal, was beaten and arrested just weeks after receiving an Oscar for documenting the ongoing attacks upon the community where he remains rooted.
“We have no other land,” a woman says in the film, “that is why we suffer for it.”
Palestinians are clinging to the rocky desert they call home. The tree growing through a boulder near my home is a living testament to life pressing against the odds. Its roots look almost like arms heaving against the stone, rolling it slowly out of its way.
Josina Guess is a Sojourners associate editor and a contributor to Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic.
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