What the Fig Tree Taught Me
They say some trees know how to wait. The fig tree is one of them.
It doesn’t bloom with urgency. It doesn’t ask for attention. It grows in its own time — rooted, quiet, steady. And maybe that’s why I chose it, or maybe it chose me.
The fig tree has always been a symbol of something deeper than fruit. In ancient civilizations, it stood for fertility, wisdom, protection. In spiritual traditions, it has shaded sages and whispered to poets. In my story, it became something else too: a metaphor for what it means to adapt, to endure, to bloom only when it is safe to do so.
Like the fig tree, I know what it means to adapt. As an immigrant, reinvention is not a choice but a language you must learn by heart. You take root in unfamiliar soil. You learn how to hold yourself upright in winds that don’t know your name. You stretch toward light even when you don’t know where it is.
And like the fig tree, I’ve had to slow down. Life has taught me that love — the real kind, the kind that holds and heals—doesn’t arrive in a rush. It arrives like morning sun through half-open shutters. It warms what’s been cold. It stays.
I live with depression. Some seasons, it silences me. Other seasons, it teaches me to listen. I’ve learned to see the difference between shutting down and slowing down. To treat stillness not as an ending, but as a gathering. I’ve learned to grow inward before growing out. To re-root. To begin again.
My name is Gabriela Nascimento. In Portuguese, Nascimento means "birth." But I often say I’m Gabriela Renascimento — rebirth. Again and again.
When I wrote A Fig Tree, Two Hearts, and Sunlight Again, I didn’t know I was writing my own quiet gospel. A book about resilience disguised as softness. A novel where love takes time, and time becomes its own kind of love.
The fig tree is no longer just a tree to me. It is life. It is the story I keep returning to. It is the shape of hope when everything else is still.
So yes, some trees know how to wait. And some people do too. Not because we are passive. But because we are learning how to stay.
