Remembering How Strong You Had to Be

O Willow Waly — from The Innocents

Chapter: Child of the Storm

Playlist: The Seeker's Lessons

Song: O Willow Waly (The Innocents) ~ Ashley Serena

This one settles right into the old wounds.

The childhood ones.

The quiet ones.

The ones you learned to protect because speaking them out loud never changed anything.

It feels like standing beside the weeping willow of your own past, remembering the girl who waited for someone to come save her.

Someone who never arrived.

As a child, I did not know why the image of a weeping willow felt so familiar.

But I remembered summers visiting my father.

Long afternoons where my sister and I played beneath one in a friend’s yard.

We stayed there for hours.

The branches formed a kind of room.

A place that felt safe and hushed and slightly magical, as if the world softened when you stepped inside it.

I did not have language for it then, but my body knew. I was meant to be there.

If you grew up alone in your feelings, this song will sit beside you.

Not to make you sad, but to help you remember how strong you had to be to survive what you did not choose.