Story recorded by the Court Reporter
1 LESLIE’S FIRST TREE STORY
2 In 1996 I was — I was pregnant with a baby. And she
3 and I got sick. She passed after she as born. And
4 we moved shortly after to a new home. We had to
5 move. And in order to heal, I found myself trimming
6 underneath this huge evergreen tree that was in the
7 very front of our yard. It was very close to the
8 house. And in time, to recover, I was really sick
9 from it. It took about a year. And I stayed
10 underneath the tree. And just no one had ever
11 trimmed it, and it was just huge (indicating) and
12 tall. So I would just climb up and trim the dead
13 branches.
14 And then we moved from there, and eventually someone
15 bought that home. And then I saw that that tree was
16 up for an option for the Botanic Garden. They were
17 looking for a Christmas tree, and they had their eye
18 on three different trees in the area. And they ended
19 up choosing that tree. And so it was like in the
20 newspaper. They cut it down. It was very close to
21 the house. And so they brought it to the Botanic
22 Garden. And they put, like, 10,000 Italian lights
23 on. And it was the Christmas tree for that year
24 And I called up the woman who ran it, and I said
OFFICIAL COURT REPORTERS –
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1 that’s a really special tree to me. And I told her
2 my daughter’s name, Zahava, and she called it
3 Zahava’s tree. And we visited, and we took a
4 picture.
5 Then many many years later, as I was working with an
6 intuitive, clearing different things, she said to me,
7 “Well, I know that you are Jewish, but there’s this
8 Christmas tree, an evergreen tree, crumpled in your
9 spine, energetically speaking.” And she said, “Does
10 that make any sense?” And I said, “Yes, it makes a
11 lot of sense.” So, I told her what my connection was
12 to that, and we cleared the tree, the tree — all the
13 gifts the tree had given to me, and its connection to
14 that event and to that time together that we spent
15 together.
16 There’s more to the story, but basically — I mean, I
17 have poems about it and writings about it. But
18 basically that’s one of the stories of being
19 connected to the tree, and that it says in you, you
20 know, you don’t go far. They don’t go far.
21 Oh, I know what the connection is. Then there was
22 Yom Kippur coming up, and Day of Atonement. And I
23 went to a river, and I played the flute, and I think
24 I tossed some kind of prayer. It landed on a leaf on
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1 the river, and it floated down. And then I went to
2 the person’s house where this tree was. And I
3 knocked on the door. And I said I need to just
4 connect, make a connection with the place where this
5 tree had been. You see that dip in your — you know.
6 She said yes. They were the same couple that donated
7 the tree. And I went to that spot. I think I
8 brought flowers and I brought water, and I played the
9 flute just to make our connection with the leaf full
10 circle. That was it. That was the story for me.
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Contributed by Leslie Schechtman