Tag: trees

Hearts and Voices Sing: Anticipate Revival

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March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened
for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice
around foliage and stem
night by night,

but as the light lengthens, preacher
of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches,
his large gestures beckon green
out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting
from the cotoneasters. A single bee
finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow
aconites glowing, low to the ground like
little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up
a purple hand here, there, as I stand
on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat
and light like a bud welcoming resurrection,
and my hand up, too, ready to sign on
for conversion.
~Luci Shaw “Revival” from What the Light was Like

The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
Out in the sun,
After frightful operation.
She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,
To be healed,
Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,
Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling
Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.
While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know
She is not going to die. 
~Ted Hughes from ” A March Morning Unlike Others” from Ted Hughes. Collected Poems

Spring is emerging slowly from this haggard and droopy winter. All growing things are still stuck in morning frost for another week at least. Then, like the old “Wizard of Oz” movie, the landscape will suddenly turn from monochrome to technicolor, the soundtrack from forlorn to glorious birdsong.

Yearning for spring to commence, I tap my foot impatiently as if owed a timely seasonal transformation from dormant to verdant.  We all have been waiting for the Physician’s announcement that this patient survived some intricate life-changing procedure: “I’m happy to say the Earth is alive after all, now revived and restored, wounded but healing, breathing on her own but too sedated for a visit just yet.”

I wait impatiently to celebrate her return to health, knowing this temporary home of ours is still very much alive. She breathes, she thrives, blooming and singing with everything she’s got.
And so will I.

He sends his command to the earth;
    his word runs swiftly.
16 He spreads the snow like wool
    and scatters the frost like ashes.
17 He hurls down his hail like pebbles.
    Who can withstand his icy blast?
18 He sends his word and melts them;
    he stirs up his breezes, and the waters flow.
Psalm 147: 15-18

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

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Breathing Through the Knothole

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Her elbow rested here
a century ago.
This is the field

she looked upon,
a mad rush of wheat
anchored to the barn.

What her thoughts were,
the words she penned
are driven into the grain,

its deep tide crossing
under my hand. She breathes
through the knothole.

Outside, the wind
pushes the farm
down an ally of stars.
~Wyatt Townley, “The Oak Desk” from The Afterlives of Trees

J.R.Tolkien’s writing desk at the Wade Center at Wheaton College
Ears of Wheat – Van Gogh museum

A writing desk is simply a repurposed tree; the smoothly sanded surface of swirling grain and knotholes nourish and produce words and stories rather than leaves and fruit.

I can easily lose myself in the wood and wondering about its origins, whether it is as I sit at a window composing, or whether I’m outside walking among the trees which are merely potential writing desks in the raw.

Museums often feature the writing desks of the famous and I’ve seen a few over the years – it is thrilling to be able touch the wood they touched as they wrote – to gaze at the same grain patterns and knotholes they saw as the words gelled, and feel the worn spots where their elbows rested.

Though my little desk won’t ever become a museum piece, nor will my words be long-remembered, I am grateful for the tree that gave me this place to sit each morning, breathing deeply, praying that when I sit here, I might bear and share worthy fruit.

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Joining in their Applause

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Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.

The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along—to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
A field of snow without a single footprint.
~Dana Gioia, “New Year’s” from Interrogations at Noon

… we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves.  And that’s all we need
To start.  That’s everything we require to keep going. 

Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.

Be good, then better.  Write books.  Cure disease.
Make us proud.  Make yourself proud.

And those who came before you?  When you hear thunder,
Hear it as their applause.
~Albert Rios from “A House Called Tomorrow”

Let us step outside for a moment
As the sun breaks through clouds
And shines on wet new fallen snow,
And breathe the new air.
So much has died that had to die this year.

Let us step outside for a moment.
It is all there
Only we have been slow to arrive
At a way of seeing it.
Unless the gentle inherit the earth
There will be no earth.
~May Sarton from “New Year Poem”

photo by Nate Gibson

Always a night from old to new!
Night and the healing balm of sleep!
Each morn is New Year’s morn come true,
Morn of a festival to keep.
All nights are sacred nights to make
Confession and resolve and prayer;
All days are sacred days to wake
New gladness in the sunny air.
Only a night from old to new;
Only a sleep from night to morn.
The new is but the old come true;
Each sunrise sees a new year born.
~Helen Hunt Jackson from “New Year’s Morning”

I awake glad this New Year’s morning,
breathing deeply of each day’s fresh start,
aglow and glistening in the light of a soft sunrise.

Dawn is our Creator’s gift to us,
a time to renew and refresh,
to be reminded of the history behind us
and humbled by the unknown ahead.

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
Isaiah 55:12

Let us join their applause…

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Cemented For Eternity

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The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.
~Jane Kenyon from “Things” from Collected Poems

Who’s this –alone with stone and sea?
It’s just the lowly Lichen We:
the alga I, the fungus me;
together, blooming quietly.
What do we share–we two together?
A brave indifference to the weather.
A slow but steady growing pace.
Resemblance to both mud and lace.
As we now, so we shall be
(if air clear and water free):
the proud but lowly Lichen We,
cemented for eternity.
~Joyce Sidman “The Lichen We” from Ubiquitous

All these years I overlooked them in the
racket of the rest, this
symbiotic splash of plant and fungus feeding
on rock, on sun, a little moisture, air —
tiny acid-factories dissolving
salt from living rocks and
eating them.

Here they are, blooming!
Trail rock, talus and scree, all dusted with it:
rust, ivory, brilliant yellow-green, and
cliffs like murals!

Huge panels streaked and patched, quietly
with shooting-stars and lupine at the base.
Closer, with the glass, a city of cups!

Clumps of mushrooms and where do the
plants begin? Why are they doing this?
In this big sky and all around me peaks &
the melting glaciers, why am I made to
kneel and peer at Tiny?
~Lew Welch, “Springtime in the Rockies,Lichen” from Ring of Bone: Collected Poems

Back then, what did I know?

Uptown and downtown.
Not north, not south, not you.

When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air,
you were grey-green, incomprehensible, old.
What you clung to, hung from: old.
Trees looking half-dead, stones.

Marriage of fungi and algae,
chemists of air,
changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.

Like those nameless ones
who kept painting, shaping, engraving,
unseen, unread, unremembered.
Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.

Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust,
ash-of-the-woods.
Transformers unvalued, uncounted.
Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in.
~Jane Hirshfield from “For the Lichens” from Come, Thief

But what is life to a lichen?
Yet its impulse to exist, to be,
is every bit as strong as ours —
arguably even stronger.
If I were told that I had to spend decades
being a furry growth on a rock in the woods,
I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t.
Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship,
endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence.
Life, in short, just wants to be.
~Bill Bryson from A Short History of Nearly Everything

I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for nearly 70 years – this farm for 30 years. The grandeur of the snow-capped mountains to the north and east and the peaceful shore to the west overwhelms everything in between. Autumn after autumn, I’ve walked past these antique apple trees, but had never stopped to really look at the landscape growing on their bare shoulders and arms. There is a whole other ecosystem on each tree, a fairy land of earth bound dryland seaweed, luxuriant in the fall rains, colorful in the winter, hidden behind leaves and fruit in the hot summer. I had never really noticed the varied color and texture all around me.

This is the world of lichen, a mixed up symbiotic cross between algae and fungus, opportunistic enough to thrive on rock faces, but simply ecstatic on absorbent bark.

It hasn’t bothered them not to be noticed as they are busy minding their own business. As poet John McCullough writes in his poem “Lichen”:

It is merely
a question of continuous
adjustment, of improvising a life.

When I’m far from friends
or the easing of a wind
against my back, I think of lichen—
never and always true to its essence,
never and always at home.

Instead of lifting my eyes to the hills and the bay for a visual feast, I need only open the back gate to gaze on this landscape found on the ancient branches in my own back yard.

It’s a rich life of improvisation indeed.

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Slip Into Something Light

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Maybe night is about to come
calling, but right now
the sun is still high in the sky.
It’s half-past October, the woods
are on fire, blue skies stretch
all the way to heaven. Of course,
we know that winter is coming, its thin
winding sheets and its hard narrow bed.
But right now, the season’s fermented
to fullness, so slip into something
light, like your skeleton; while these old
bones are still working, my darling,
let’s dance.
~Barbara Crooker, “Reel” from The Book of Kells

I’ve never been much of a dancer other than the square dancing we were taught in grade school. I could do-si-do with the best of them.

Our church used to hold an annual square dance in November along with a harvest dinner. We gathered in a school gymnasium, where my husband and I learned to Virginia Reel up and back and be sore the next day. Those were the days…

Instead, our trees dance and reel this time of year, creating a scandal by getting more naked with each passing day and breeze. They sway and bow and join limbs. Their bare bones grasp one another in preparation for their cold and narrow winter bed, wrapped in the shroud that will give way, yet again to the green leaves of spring, only a few months away.

Pick a partner and away you go!

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Choosing to Protect Unseen Nests

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I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
~Tess Gallagher “Choices” from Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems

Might I be capable of such tenderness?
Might I consider the needs of others,
by saving not just one nest,
but all future nests,
rather than exercise my right
to an unimpeded view,
wanting the world to be exactly
how I want it?

I must not forget:
my right to choose
demands that I
choose to do right by those
who have no choice.

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Wouldn’t It Be Cheaper?

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Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
~Mary Oliver “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness” from A Thousand Mornings

Nature is, above all, profligate.  Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place?
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

It is a good thing I wasn’t assigned the role of Designer of the Universe because all would have gone awry in my dedication to resource management, efficiency and creating less waste. To avoid having to blow around, rake, pick up and compost all those fallen autumn leaves, my trees would keep their leaves forever, just like evergreens keep needles. I also would decide there should be fewer insect species, namely wasps, fleas, chiggers, bed bugs, mosquitoes and fruit flies. In addition, fewer rodents, viruses, toxic bacteria and pesky parasites. 

The list is endless: things would be different in my Thrifty Design Of All Things Natural.

But of course the balance of living and dying things would then be disturbed and off kilter.

Rather than worry about the wastefulness,  I should revel in the abundance as I watch death recreate itself to life again. Nature has built-in redundancy, teems with remarkable inefficiency and overwhelms with extravagance. 

As I too am just another collection of cells with similar profligacy, I can’t say much. I better not complain. Thank goodness for the redundancy and extravagance found in my own body, from the constant shedding of my skin covering to my over supply of nasal mucus during a upper respiratory infection helping me shed viral particles, to the pairing of many organs and parts allowing me a usable spare in case of system failure.

Sometimes cheaper costs more. Sometimes extravagance is intentional and rational, making cheap look … well, cheap.

Clearly things are meant to be as they are, thanks to a very wise Designer.

If I am ever in doubt, I simply look out at the leaf-carpeted front yard…or in the mirror.

Then it all makes sense.

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So Soft

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the hard mountains,
and the spears of the trees-
from a distance,
look so soft
~L.L. Barkat

photo by Joel DeWaard
photo by Joel DeWaard
photo by Joel DeWaard

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for — 
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
~Mary Oliver from “Mindful” from Why I Wake Early

Some days I’m the sharp needle
and other days I’m the pin cushion

Some days I may be both,
probing others’ lives and feelings,
moving beyond sharp edges
to find the source of pain.

I wince too,
remembering how it feels.

I notice the gentle light
that floats close to the ground,
that reaches out with cloudy grasp.

This is what I was born for:
destined to be lost
in the softness of each morning,
and still be found before the end of day.

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Welcome Back, Trees

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I go by a field where once
I cultivated a few poor crops.
It is now covered with young trees,
for the forest that belongs here
has come back and reclaimed its own.
And I think of all the effort
I have wasted and all the time,
and of how much joy I took
in that failed work and how much
it taught me. For in so failing
I learned something of my place,
something of myself, and now
I welcome back the trees.
~Wendell Berry, “IX” from Leavings.

As we both grow older, we watch our some of our farm’s fields slowly fill in with young trees, despite our efforts over the years to keep pulling out saplings to preserve pasture. Yet the trees are more determined to fill in the gaps than we are to remove them. The cottonwoods, alders and maples are returning to what once was their soil.

After all, this land was forested over a century ago and yielded to determined loggers and farmers as the old growth firs and cedars fell to the axe and the deciduous trees became firewood and furniture. We now find ourselves yielding back what we can, acknowledging what this land and these patient trees have to teach us about our transience. A few decades are a short stay to those who send roots and branches deep and wide in their effort to stay put.

Welcome back, trees. You have kindly waited for your turn to own the ground again.

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An Eternal Ultimate Eye

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Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods.  Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death.  Even the sun has gone off somewhere…

Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head.  
~Jane Kenyon from “Season of Change and Loss” in Winter: A Spiritual Biography

The tree, and its haunting bird,
Are the loves of my heart;
But where is the word, the word,
Oh where is the art,

To say, or even to see,
For a moment of time,
What the Tree and the Bird must be
In the true sublime?

They shine, listening to the soul,
And the soul replies;
But the inner love is not whole,
and the moment dies.

Oh give me before I die
The grace to see
With eternal, ultimate eye,
The Bird and the Tree.

The song in the living Green,
The Tree and the Bird –
Oh have they ever been seen,
Ever been heard?
~Ruth Pitter “The Bird in the Tree”

Every day now we hear hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the few ducks that have stayed in the marshes through the winter, or possibly a Canadian goose or a deer to bring home for the freezer.   The usual day-long serenade of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, hawks and eagle screams and chittering from the treetops, the occasional dog barking, woodpeckers hammering at tree bark with the bluejays and squirrels arguing over the last of the filbert nuts.

In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth. Our horses, confined to their stalls in the barns, snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of summer-bound hay.

But there are no longer birdsong arias; I’m left bereft of their blending musical tapestry that wakes me at 4 AM in the spring.

And no peeper orchestra tuning up in the swamps in the evenings, rising and falling on the breeze.

It is way too quiet – clearly a time of bereavement. The chilly silence of the darkened days, interrupted by gunshot percussion, is like a baton raised in anticipation after rapping the podium to bring us all to attention. I wait and listen for the downbeat of spring — the return of birds and frogs tuning their throats, preparing their symphony.

Oh, give me the grace to see and hear the Bird in the Tree with an eternal ultimate eye and ear.

Like a bird on a tree
I’m just sitting here
I get time
It’s clear to see
From up here
The world seems small
We can seat together
It’s so beautiful
You and me
We meant to be
In the great outdoors
Forever free
Sometimes you need to go
And take a step back
To see the truth around you
From a distance you can tell
You and me
We meant to be
In the great outdoors
Forever free
~Eldar Kedem

Between the March and April line—
That magical frontier
Beyond which summer hesitates,
Almost too heavenly near.
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,
The maddest noise that grows and grows,—
The birds, they make it in the spring,
At night’s delicious close.
The saddest noise I know.
It makes us think of all the dead
That sauntered with us here,
By separation’s sorcery
Made cruelly more dear.
It makes us think of what we had,
And what we now deplore.
We almost wish those siren throats
Would go and sing no more.
An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear,
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near.
~Lyrics adapted from an Emily Dickinson poem

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