The Healing Tree
A Mermaid, A Poet, and a Miracle

a book by Joe Tye

For an autographed copy, send an email to joe@joetye.com with your postal address and the words "The Healing Tree" in the subject line. We’ll send the book with an invoice for $15 (plus $3 shipping).

In the tradition of The Christmas Box and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Joe Tye’s new book The Healing Tree is a heart-warming story that also includes an important life lesson. After a speeding drunk driver plowed into her car, killing her husband and smashing her legs, Carrie Anne Murphy looked down upon her broken body from a high corner of the emergency room as the trauma team fought desperately to save her life. When she made the decision to come back, Carrie Anne had no idea how much pain she would have to endure. She also could not have dreamed of the blessings that this tragedy would bring into her life – if she could only endure the pain.

Fortunately, Carrie Anne doesn’t have to cope alone. Mysterious Maggie, the hospital’s poetry therapist and mermaid for drowning souls, helps Carrie Anne reclaim her soul and find her voice. Losing her legs, Carrie Anne discovers, was what it took for her to stop running away from a dream that had been chasing her since she was in ninth grade – the dream of sharing her heart in the words of her poems.

One unique feature of this book is the original poetry of both Maggie and Carrie Anne. Through their poems, the reader experiences the emotional roller coaster of life at its toughest – and cannot help but be inspired to confront his or her own challenges more courageously as a result. More than a dozen discussion questions at the end of the book will encourage leaders at hospitals, corporations, and nonprofit organizations to purchase The Healing Tree for their employees, and also facilitate book club conversations.

The greatest miracle of all is not something that happens to you, it’s something that happens within you; this is the story of one such miracle.
Maggie opened her eyes again, and there was still a hint of the emerald fire in them. “Yes you can,” she whispered. In the years to come, I would hear the invisible whisper of those three words a million times – as they wheeled me out of my hospital cocoon to finally take me home; the day I drove my new car that was specially-equipped with paraplegic controls; as Amanda buckled me into the custom ski that reignited my passion for the sport Mark and I had loved so well; the day I wheeled myself into the hospital volunteer office and clipped on my new nametag: Carrie Anne Murphy – Poetry Therapist. But on this day, I was powerless to do the one thing I would have given anything to be able to do.
- from The Healing Tree

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