Sometimes there is nothing
absolutely nothing
to do but watch
and wait
and let the clock which breaks our days
let go its grasp
until the mind is able
to trust the storm
to bear up the weight of flesh and bone
to take on the time of breath
a rhythm of blood
a rhythm held
between two breaths
a bright cry
a last rasp
~Moya Cannon “Attention”
When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the cracks, and the mountains slam.
~Annie Dillard, from “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through
the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~Mary Oliver from “The Summer Day”
I don’t know why, of all the trees that peppered this hill over 150 years ago, this one was spared. Perhaps she was the tallest at the time, or the straightest, or just didn’t yield to the ax as the others did.
She has become the sentinel on our farm, a focal point:
the marker by which all else is measured.
She is aging – now some bare branches, though still heavy with cones – the constantly changing backdrop of clouds, color and light shift and swirl around her. Some days she knocks me breathless; I’m struck like Annie Dillard’s bell.
Visitors climb the hill to her first before seeing anything else on the farm, to witness for themselves the expanse that she surveys. Her limbs oversee gatherings of early Easter morning worship, summer evening church services, winter sledding parties, and Fourth of July celebrations.
This one special fir tree stands alone, apart from the others, but is never lonely – not really. She shares her top with the eagles and hawks and her shade with humans and other critters.
This is her home that she shares with us.
This is her one wild and precious life.
Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe
Me.”
Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.
~Daniel Ladinsky, from “The Gift”
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