Planting New Seeds

By Catie Poersch ’25

Each week during Upper School chapel, a member of the community gives the homily. These are often powerful and personal reflections on their life experiences.

Hi, my name is Catie Poersch, and I’m a senior.

When I was a baby, my parents planted a cherry blossom tree in our front yard. Every year, right around my birthday, the tree would bloom into beautiful pink blossoms—my favorite color.

When you have a sibling, not a lot of things feel like your own. But that tree was mine. It outshone every other sapling on the block, including my sister’s puny excuse for a tree. (Sorry, Claire.)

As I grew up, the tree grew with me. I watched it grow season after season from my bedroom window. I used to hug its trunk and climb its branches.

When I was 10, we moved houses. The tree that had captivated my childhood had to be left behind as I packed my old life away. But despite the move, driving past my old house and seeing my tree still made me feel connected to my childhood.

But then, a few years ago I drove by my old house to find the tree gone! All that remained was a small stump barely peeking out behind overgrown grass.

This new discovery affected me deeply. Even though it was just a tree, it felt like a part of me was gone, that my childhood—all that joy, all those happy memories, all my feelings of success—was in danger of slipping away. If I didn’t have that tree, what did I have?

My sophomore year cut me down to a stump. Everything that had been going well for me suddenly wasn’t. I had always been a great student, but my classes were the hardest they had ever been and my grades began to drop. 

As a freshman I’d been a starter in softball, but now I was struggling.  I found myself benched mid-season because I wasn’t performing.

I used to go to bed relaxed, able to let go of my day and wake up refreshed, but now I never felt rested.

I suffered through the school day and struggled through practice. When I got home, I found myself mindlessly scrolling on my phone trying to forget the day. By the time I started my homework, it was late at night, and I’d wake up again the next morning feeling worse.

It was a vicious cycle. I felt like the only reason I could drag myself out of bed each morning was knowing that I would get to go back to sleep at the end of the day. I was burnt out, exhausted, and unhealthy. I hated myself. I hated the way I looked, the way I felt, and the way I behaved.

All the things I’d prided myself on—grades and success and a balanced life—were all off. I felt lost, cut down, a lifeless stump.

But there was something about that pain that forced me to take a step back and examine myself—to examine the person who I used to be and the person who I wanted to become.

I realized that I couldn’t just keep going the way I was. I had lost a piece of myself somewhere. I had been listening to the voice in my head that told me I wasn’t enough unless I was succeeding. The voice that punished me whenever I did anything wrong. But I didn’t need to listen to that voice, because it wasn’t me. I had to build my self-esteem on a new foundation. It was time to decide who I wanted to grow into.

In our reading from Matthew’s gospel today, Jesus says that those who follow him are like someone who builds their house on rock. He says those who build their houses on rock will not fall, but those who build their houses on sand will. Jesus is calling us to find stability. He doesn’t say that a strong base stops the rain and the floods, but it keeps us from falling. When we build a strong foundation, we stay firm in hard times.

In my time of struggle, I realized that true stability doesn’t come from the things that are going right, but from where I turn to when they are going wrong. That realization helped me remember the things that mattered most, the things that could serve as a strong foundation no matter what came my way. My family, friends, God, but most of all myself—the true self that had been with me all along.

I learned that my value isn’t determined by my performance, my achievements, or society. My value comes from my role as a friend, the way I serve others, and my relationship with God. My foundation is my personhood.

Every day, I work to become the person that I want to be, but that doesn’t mean the person I am now isn’t someone to be proud of. My former experiences are like the rings inside of the trunk of my old tree, each shaped by the next, all part of the whole. It includes myself today, at 17, standing on a firm foundation, my 16-year-old self learning to heal from pain, my 15-year-old self steadying her course, and so on, all the way back to my 7-year-old self picking blossoms from the tree each spring…and beyond. Each ring of the tree makes the trunk stronger.

Even though the old me was deeply flawed, I wouldn’t be here without her. Every version of myself has helped make me who I am today. And while the girl who used to dance around the cherry blossom tree may now feel distant and even a little unrecognizable, it’s because of her, and the many others after her, that I am the person I have become.

Our past, even the parts that feel like failure, is always with us.  Unlike that cherry tree, the past can’t be cut down, not really. But the pain of the past can be what forces us to become better people; it allows us to plant new seeds and start new beginnings, to build strong foundations.

Recently I came home to a baby cherry blossom in the front yard.

“That’s your tree,” my dad said.

It was my tree—it was just a little different; something new and beautiful to grow into in my own way.

Amen.