Trees

Finding Center among Tree Trunks

Once there was a woman who spent a morning with a tree. They were well known to each other, having spent many mornings together, afternoons and evenings too. She called this tree the Leaning Tree, its sturdy cedar base growing from the lenient earth on a diagonal slant as if people had been leaning against it since it was an innocent sapling. The Leaning Tree supported her pondering, her sobbing, her anger, barrenness and even her lover’s back as she once dared some forest passion. This morning she leans back, heedless of sap, then slides down the trunk to sit on the meandering roots. Her weary spine presses in until she feels the sap flow slow, so slowly. The Leaning Tree teaches her that slow is good, so good. “Why can’t you remember that?” the Leaning Tree chides. Why can’t I remember? Because remembering hurts.
Her shoulder blades fit into the cedar bark like missing puzzle pieces, like tessellations, a mystery of no beginnings or endings and no need to know the answers to her questions. Tears flow, blood flows, sap flows so slowly. Her heart, the knothole of a broken branch that once reached out, greening into love, now snaps back to her core, her sturdy trunk. She presses her sacrum into forgiving soil ~ quieted by fallen needles and death. She slows, so slow in release of grief, comforted by the natural cycle of things ~ a cycle she knows, but sometimes forgets. Remembering hurts.

Why is it that I always need to go beyond, beyond the swallowtails mating in the air, beyond site of base camp, beyond the Wooly-Mullen and the last participant in this workshop? I keep walking to a periphery, a road, a divide, a threshold. It is there I spy you, a ponderosa snag ~ dead from the inside out. Your needle less limbs draped like a swooning maiden, drip-line dry, stripped of all but a patched, red-bark skirt. And yet, your gnarled branches still offer a resting place for the chick a dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.

Finally, I am alone, and with that thought the urge to turn on my cell phone is almost overwhelming ~ connect, connect, connect, the need to connect is stronger than the need for solitude. Where is my place in the circle of mariposa? Mariposa de sueno, te pareces a mi alma. You are like my soul, a butterfly of my dream. Where is my place beyond Neruda, my place amidst fading larkspur? On which sedimentary rock do I rest?

Ponderosa, you stand alone as I do, somewhat aloof. You do not beckon me like the cedar Leaning Tree. I keep a respectful distance, my elder. Perhaps you are tired of serving, tired of reaching out, always the giving tree. Perhaps you only need to stand rooted, pocked with woodpecker holes, sapless as I am soon to be, and just be. Let that be enough. If some little critter chooses to nest in you, fine, she is welcome. It is you, Ponderosa, to which I need to connect, not the tenuous and wireless, 1,000 miles away. It is you, in this chattery silence, which holds the questions for my answers, the calm for my chaos, the acceptance of empty.
I ask you, may I come closer? May I step in to you? May I touch you, cracked and dry ~ you offer no shade. Brittle bark scratches my back as I lean in. But you still smell like grandmother's closets. Grandmother pine, I call on you now as the blood leaves my body, perhaps for the last time. Sapless, childless, what will I leave behind? What seeds have I planted, like your tender saplings greening around you now? What poetry will come as I stand on the threshold of just be, rejoicing in my rooted ness?