Skip to main content

Farewells


This has been a year of farewells.
Dad dying.
Son number one off to college.
Son number too growing up fast.
A body being quirky.
But through it all I've had a friend, a ponderosa pine tree.
Odd?
Maybe. 
But I visited it as frequently as any bestie would, walking the requisite three miles up apex trail to sit in its low branches, breathing in the vanilla-orange-pine scent of its bark beneath an umbrella of cones and needles. 

Today I bundled up and hiked an hour for our visit only to discover that a fire had blazed along a small stretch of trail in my absence, taking my tree with it. 

I stood beneath blackened branches with tears on my face.  Tears for my tree, for my dad and all the changes in a life. Not because there’s anything wrong with change or unnatural about fires, both are necessary and contribute to the health of the system. No I grieved because my friend was gone and I would miss it. Because this tree of all the trees on the trail had become dear to me. Why? Why does anything become dear to us? Because we pause in our self absorbed humaning long enough to really see it and appreciate the life living it.

My tree will decompose and feed the earth and the cycle of life will continue, but I will remember it. The scent of its bark, the arc of its branches and the way my heart leapt when I rounded the bend in the trail to catch sight of a familiar evergreen against a bright blue sky.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.
4 comments
Read more

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
2 comments
Read more

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...
4 comments
Read more