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Missing Pieces
Published on BBC Travel, Nov. 17, 2014 With gratitude to Lisa Francesca and Susan Shillinglaw for their many readings and words of wisdom. Excerpt: I walk back to the empty shore, my summer-long sense of division slipping away. Soon the crowd piles back into the pontoons, and we resume our boisterous journey through this canyon that exists as lack of rock. Listening to Audrey’s happy chatter and tracking the gaze of my silent, light-conscious son, I feel presence and absence as one. I know the truth, both geologic and familial, that you can’t have what you have without missing what you’re missing. The erosive effects of our maturation create us, sloughing and shedding, dusting and polishing as we grow. Like the destructive yet creative Colorado, what takes also gives. And from this weathering we get our height and depth, our texture and dimensions, our facets of character and being. From this we take our ever-shifting shapes.
Click here for the rest of this essay on BBC Travel. 
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Enlightenment
Published on Gadling, May 3, 2011 San Jose State University | James D. Phelan Literary Award - 2nd Place, Familiar Essay (2011) With gratitude to Cathleen Miller for her encouragement and referral to Don George. Excerpt: Ah, the gondolier.
We've been admiring these flocks of muscular, zebra-shirted young men at every stazi, but we've avoided their incessant invitations to board. We tell each other it's a kitschy thing to do, not in keeping with our quest for authenticity, but the truth is that, at 80 euro, we'd rather appreciate them from afar. Then, late one languid afternoon near the end of our trip, we wander through a tiny campo off the beaten path and spy, leaning against the balustrade of the bridge in a despondent pose, a solitary gondolier. Click here for the rest of this essay on Gadling.com, where it was published as "Love in Venice: how a grumpy gondolier helped show me the heart of his city." And yes, the picture below is of the gondolier in this essay. 
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En Plain Eyre
A personal essay about the effect of stratified landscapes on the author, heroine, and reader of Jane Eyre
Click here to read the essay.
Abstract: The 1846 novel Jane Eyre is topographically rich with countless references to natural elements and rustic landscapes that act as mirrors, emissaries, refuges, guides, and oracles. The salvation of the eponymous protagonist, for instance, is achieved when she follows the moon across the moor to the house of the Rivers, and then her heart into the forest. No doubt author Charlotte Bronte’s childhood on the Yorkshire moors, where she spent hours cathartically writing after her mother’s and two sisters’ deaths, was a powerful influence on the setting and character of her protagonist.
As a reader who has always been deeply attuned to and affected by my own natural settings, I strongly identify with the solace and insight that both Bronte and Eyre receive from nature. Because we are all products of our environment to arguable degrees, I believe all readers share this response to the novel, at least subconsciously. This personal literary essay explores the ways in which the author, protagonist, and reader of Jane Eyre are unified by their superimposed landscapes, and the depth this stratification adds to the reader’s experience.
Abstract: The 1846 novel Jane Eyre is topographically rich with countless references to natural elements and rustic landscapes that act as mirrors, emissaries, refuges, guides, and oracles. The salvation of the eponymous protagonist, for instance, is achieved when she follows the moon across the moor to the house of the Rivers, and then her heart into the forest. No doubt author Charlotte Bronte’s childhood on the Yorkshire moors, where she spent hours cathartically writing after her mother’s and two sisters’ deaths, was a powerful influence on the setting and character of her protagonist.
As a reader who has always been deeply attuned to and affected by my own natural settings, I strongly identify with the solace and insight that both Bronte and Eyre receive from nature. Because we are all products of our environment to arguable degrees, I believe all readers share this response to the novel, at least subconsciously. This personal literary essay explores the ways in which the author, protagonist, and reader of Jane Eyre are unified by their superimposed landscapes, and the depth this stratification adds to the reader’s experience.
Seasons
Published in Reed Magazine: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Vol. 59, 2006
San Jose State University | Bonita M. Cox Award for Creative Nonfiction (2006)
San Jose State University | James D. Phelan Literary Award - Second Place, Familiar Essay/Reminiscence (2004)
Published in Reed Magazine: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Vol. 59, 2006
San Jose State University | Bonita M. Cox Award for Creative Nonfiction (2006)
San Jose State University | James D. Phelan Literary Award - Second Place, Familiar Essay/Reminiscence (2004)
Here in the south San Jose foothills, the sharpest turn of the year is that between spring and summer. There is an indefinite intermingling of the other seasons, a gradual adjustment in the quantities of color and water and growth, until we belatedly realize the nakedness of the buckeye or the buds bursting out on the oak. But summer sneaks up on spring and pounces. One morning there is a pale frothy head on the long green grasses, and the next their soft waves have become a brittle, stabbing mélange of thistles and foxtails.
With equal abruptness, my dying father has become a frail, parched shell of his indefatigable self. From my home along the edge of Quicksilver County Park, just a few ridges and seventy years from the hills he roamed in the 1930s, it is easy to mark the parallel between his ruin and that of the land. Even as I write, the golden glow of evening burns on the tips of the yellow grasses, flickering, swaying in the breeze like a candlelight vigil in a vast memento mori. The timeless dance of death has trampled across both the meadow and my heart, and I ache with the melancholy of universal demise.
It is through the beauty and spirituality of nature that I have always connected with my father, who made sure my five siblings and I grew up mostly outdoors. He remembered fondly his boyhood exploring in the Los Gatos foothills, and described his adventures to us vividly at the dinner table, or on family hikes, or as he tucked us into bed. I still cannot pass Lexington Lake without envisioning four dusty, terrified boys dangling from the now extinct flume, nor see the town creek without hearing his whoop of joy at a just-plucked trout or a bare-skinned plunge, nor see the scattered light under a sycamore without feeling the sting of his tree-fort splinters. His was a childhood of the outdoors, and he recreated it for us in well-told tales, mountain vacations, and the natural settings he chose for our homes.
He built our first house himself, a simple structure nestled on a shaded slope among madrone and tan oak and bay laurel in the Saratoga hills, near Los Gatos. The air was so clear the night Neil Armstrong strode across the Sea of Tranquility that I insisted I could see him with the naked eye. By day we dug tunnels toward China and threw rocks down into the sprawling valley, where the rising smoke of orchard pyres signaled the sacrifice of fruit trees for silicon. When the world below us was being paved for progress, and the proximity of our hillside home began attracting ardent realtors, my father moved us to an old apple farm on the Santa Cruz side of the range. There, sans television, we were blissfully happy riding horses and building forts and climbing trees. The beach was a mile away, its sand unthreatened by the crucibles of what would soon be called Silicon Valley. The encroachment of urbanity had been, for the time, deferred.
My father always took us real camping and fishing, tended a thriving vegetable garden, taught us about nature, and encouraged us to be resourceful and responsible. He and my mother, another former teacher, believed children needed fresh air, whole food, good books and inspiring music – a formula I find myself struggling to follow in a society pervaded by Halo, Quarter Pounders, and Eminem. My own childhood seems suffused with Wordsworth’s “celestial light,” a gift from my parents.
But death cannot retract that gift; in fact, it enhances it. Even in the decay of the bleached meadow I am discovering that there are gifts that cannot be opened or appreciated until the life has left them. The pungent fragrance of the fallen oak leaves and sunburnt weeds crackling under my feet helps me understand that there is a different quality of being in the fallen leaf, the severed stem – a new beauty in the brokenness, a new force released by the rupture. There is an elevation that follows the descent of a life, just as the setting sun clears the way for the grandeur of a star-spangled sky. The numb nothingness in my heart clears space to remember, treasure, and share. There is a song that, to be sung, requires death.
Twilight tints the mountains lavender. I stand just outside the split-rail fence that divides my suburban home from the untamed wilderness, the artificial from the natural, the fleeting from the eternal, the present from the past. Before me sprawl the wooded foothills, undulating with oaks and buckeyes, where my children play. Beyond, in purple layers spiked with redwoods, rise the forested hills where their grandfather once played. Down their far side, in the invisible distance, roll the orchard hills where I played as a child, and where my father now lies fading in the old white farmhouse.
Yet even as nature robs me of his existence, I know that it is through nature that I will forever detect my father’s presence. I am sure to find him in sun-spattered, backlit woods, in the rich scent of warm plowed earth, in the brash squawk of the stellar jay, in the mineral taste of a mountain stream. And wherever a trout ripples the dappled water, I will again be a child trudging along beside him, his big warm hand over mine.
Rod Clendenen passed away on June 16, 2003 at his farm in Watsonville, surrounded by his wife and six children.
With equal abruptness, my dying father has become a frail, parched shell of his indefatigable self. From my home along the edge of Quicksilver County Park, just a few ridges and seventy years from the hills he roamed in the 1930s, it is easy to mark the parallel between his ruin and that of the land. Even as I write, the golden glow of evening burns on the tips of the yellow grasses, flickering, swaying in the breeze like a candlelight vigil in a vast memento mori. The timeless dance of death has trampled across both the meadow and my heart, and I ache with the melancholy of universal demise.
It is through the beauty and spirituality of nature that I have always connected with my father, who made sure my five siblings and I grew up mostly outdoors. He remembered fondly his boyhood exploring in the Los Gatos foothills, and described his adventures to us vividly at the dinner table, or on family hikes, or as he tucked us into bed. I still cannot pass Lexington Lake without envisioning four dusty, terrified boys dangling from the now extinct flume, nor see the town creek without hearing his whoop of joy at a just-plucked trout or a bare-skinned plunge, nor see the scattered light under a sycamore without feeling the sting of his tree-fort splinters. His was a childhood of the outdoors, and he recreated it for us in well-told tales, mountain vacations, and the natural settings he chose for our homes.
He built our first house himself, a simple structure nestled on a shaded slope among madrone and tan oak and bay laurel in the Saratoga hills, near Los Gatos. The air was so clear the night Neil Armstrong strode across the Sea of Tranquility that I insisted I could see him with the naked eye. By day we dug tunnels toward China and threw rocks down into the sprawling valley, where the rising smoke of orchard pyres signaled the sacrifice of fruit trees for silicon. When the world below us was being paved for progress, and the proximity of our hillside home began attracting ardent realtors, my father moved us to an old apple farm on the Santa Cruz side of the range. There, sans television, we were blissfully happy riding horses and building forts and climbing trees. The beach was a mile away, its sand unthreatened by the crucibles of what would soon be called Silicon Valley. The encroachment of urbanity had been, for the time, deferred.
My father always took us real camping and fishing, tended a thriving vegetable garden, taught us about nature, and encouraged us to be resourceful and responsible. He and my mother, another former teacher, believed children needed fresh air, whole food, good books and inspiring music – a formula I find myself struggling to follow in a society pervaded by Halo, Quarter Pounders, and Eminem. My own childhood seems suffused with Wordsworth’s “celestial light,” a gift from my parents.
But death cannot retract that gift; in fact, it enhances it. Even in the decay of the bleached meadow I am discovering that there are gifts that cannot be opened or appreciated until the life has left them. The pungent fragrance of the fallen oak leaves and sunburnt weeds crackling under my feet helps me understand that there is a different quality of being in the fallen leaf, the severed stem – a new beauty in the brokenness, a new force released by the rupture. There is an elevation that follows the descent of a life, just as the setting sun clears the way for the grandeur of a star-spangled sky. The numb nothingness in my heart clears space to remember, treasure, and share. There is a song that, to be sung, requires death.
Twilight tints the mountains lavender. I stand just outside the split-rail fence that divides my suburban home from the untamed wilderness, the artificial from the natural, the fleeting from the eternal, the present from the past. Before me sprawl the wooded foothills, undulating with oaks and buckeyes, where my children play. Beyond, in purple layers spiked with redwoods, rise the forested hills where their grandfather once played. Down their far side, in the invisible distance, roll the orchard hills where I played as a child, and where my father now lies fading in the old white farmhouse.
Yet even as nature robs me of his existence, I know that it is through nature that I will forever detect my father’s presence. I am sure to find him in sun-spattered, backlit woods, in the rich scent of warm plowed earth, in the brash squawk of the stellar jay, in the mineral taste of a mountain stream. And wherever a trout ripples the dappled water, I will again be a child trudging along beside him, his big warm hand over mine.
Rod Clendenen passed away on June 16, 2003 at his farm in Watsonville, surrounded by his wife and six children.
Remains
Published in Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics, Vol. 3.1, Summer 2012
The first rainstorm sloughs the hills of dead leaves and dust, filling the dry channel below our home with a muddy rush. The creek charges another hundred yards and then under the street to spew into a secluded pond, where its boisterous entrance blurs the delta with silt. By spring the soil has settled, and the pond’s reappearing shoreline sprouts new blades. Cattails bloom in spiky, rust-tipped stands. Great white egrets wade at water’s edge, their long necks arced in graceful question marks. Ducklings trip and tumble through the weeds. In long ago springs when my children were little, we would walk to this hidden idyll with bags of crumbled bread to feed the birds. Now that my own nest has emptied, I honor those memories by picking up trash at the pond, a small good deed that costs me only time. But one day early last spring, it nearly cost my life.
Read more on page 26 of Written River . . .
Published in Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics, Vol. 3.1, Summer 2012
The first rainstorm sloughs the hills of dead leaves and dust, filling the dry channel below our home with a muddy rush. The creek charges another hundred yards and then under the street to spew into a secluded pond, where its boisterous entrance blurs the delta with silt. By spring the soil has settled, and the pond’s reappearing shoreline sprouts new blades. Cattails bloom in spiky, rust-tipped stands. Great white egrets wade at water’s edge, their long necks arced in graceful question marks. Ducklings trip and tumble through the weeds. In long ago springs when my children were little, we would walk to this hidden idyll with bags of crumbled bread to feed the birds. Now that my own nest has emptied, I honor those memories by picking up trash at the pond, a small good deed that costs me only time. But one day early last spring, it nearly cost my life.
Read more on page 26 of Written River . . .
The Walking Woman
Published as "Desolation" in The Journey magazine, March-April 2011, p. 14 - print and online
It’s a gusty autumn evening in the woods near my home. Bare branches crackle the ochre sky, and loose leaves flap and flutter across my narrow path, darting and swooping before settling into silent drifts. Some sail down the current of the creek; one hangs upon the brittle web of a wiry shrub, trembling like a spider’s prey. I scuffle and crunch along, careful to avoid the burgundy legs of berry vines that sprawl and clamp across the trail. I’m ankle-deep in death.
Stumbling along in all this grief of landscape, the depression that has dogged me for the past few years prevails. I succumb to brooding on the transience of life: my father’s unjust death, my nearly empty nest, my so-called friend’s detachment -- my sense of immortality, purpose, and value – until I’m startled from my dreary thoughts by a muttering that spews from just around the bend. A ropey brown hand, mottled as the leaves, pushes aside the chapparal and a walnut face emerges, framed within a messy corona of long white hair.
I stop and step aside. I know her well, though only from afar. She is the Walking Woman, as I call her; the old gypsy lady of lackluster Almaden, who strides our suburban sidewalks in crepey tangerine and turquoise skirts that swish above her bobby socks and Keds. In her mid-seventies at the least, she paces resolutely, thrusting her pointed chin forward and her narrow shoulders back. She always walks alone. Despite the thick matting of her straight, shoulder-length hair, there is something coordinated in her comportment and clothing that connotes good health and cleanliness. She’s slender, tan, and fit, and no wonder; I’ve seen her in locations several miles apart, from dawn to dusk, and often enough to assume that she walks all day, every day. That, and her solitude and apparel, mark her as eccentric, and possibly mentally ill.
Still, something about her has always resonated with me, even when I first noticed her in my home town of Santa Cruz, a mountain range and thirty years away. Santa Cruz has always pulsed with interesting characters, and this was especially true in the 1970s, so I’ve never understood why her presence caught my self-centric teenage eye and stayed in my conscious memory long enough for me to recognize her so many decades later, here in Almaden. I’ve often asked my fellow residents if they know who she is or where she lives. Strangely, though she’s both ubiquitous and unique – far more the latter in this conformist community than in notoriously eclectic Santa Cruz -- no one else seems to have seen her, not even my husband. How can that be, I’ve puzzled, when she’s so distinctive? I’ve sometimes wondered if I might have made her up – if she is really there – but here she is.
“Hi,” I say, heart rushing, though I don’t yet know why.
These woods have always been my place of restoration, but today their nakedness has only added to my gloom. Surrounded by decay, the pallor of my own seeming insignificance reflects off every rotting thing. What difference do I make? Nature, after all, simply follows its predetermined patterns. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes understood: “That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Everything is the same as it ever was and ever will be. We are forever cycling toward demise.
I pick my son up from third grade with a blanket and a picnic and take him to the creek where I let him discover the deer trail leading down to its oak-shaded bank. When he sees the burbling water and the bobbing mallards and the tire swing he jumps up and down and yells “Cool! Wish I had my swim trunks!” I produce the desired item from my bottomless tote bag and he sheepishly mumbles “Aw, I love you, Mom.” He makes me turn around while he changes and then he plays for an hour and a half in the water, getting soaked, pushing stuff around with long bamboo poles, shrieking with delight. This is the moment that surges across my mind the day he stomps off to his dorm and tells me to leave him alone.
Dangling dry twigs tangle up my hair, and I trip over a fallen sycamore branch. The stubbed toe deepens my sulk. Why work so hard to forge trails few will follow, that soon will be grown over? Why care so much, when all is doomed to pass? I’m too aware that time rolls along relentlessly and undoes what we do, the achievements and pleasures and people we love. My mind is brimming with beloved moments that bite when I reach for them.
He packs up the coffee and cinnamon rolls and we set off at five o'clock in the morning, while the stars are still shining full strength. We crack our windows to let the raw morning slide in, untainted by traffic fumes or noises, filled only with the vociferous chorus of crickets chipping away at the darkness. I love the silence that connects us across the seat. He stretches out his hand, creased by years of groping around in autoshop engines and by farm labor, and wraps it around mine. We don’t say much until it starts to get light. We stop then, on the outskirts of a field, and have our sweet rolls while the sun hauls itself over the edge of the world. I don’t care much for fishing, or for fish. It’s the trip that matters, and my dad. I give him back these memories years later, as the cancer gnaws away at his lungs.
I pull away from the pain of the past, turning for consolation toward my stock list of hard-earned attributes. Today it brings no comfort . I realize that at forty-six, I’ve lost my sense of self beneath dozens of decency labels – Good Mother, Caring Friend, Diligent Student, Responsible Citizen, Valuable Employee – the mundane list goes on, to no effect. I’ve only plastered them on like bandages to hide my insecurities as I lurch, mummy-like, from goal to goal. With age and certain losses, they’ve begun to lose their glue and peel loose. Now my life is pervaded by the anxiety of exposure, the fear that soon everyone will see that there is nothing underneath. I am invisible to myself. The futility of slapping more labels over the void intensifies my depression. So does the fear of not doing so. Maybe I should be on medication.
The Walking Woman peers at me, eyes silver-blue and glinting through narrowed lids. Her muttering breaks off, but she doesn’t respond, or even pause. As she plunges down the trail toward me I’m increasingly certain that this encounter, however brief, will have some sort of significance for me. Perhaps it’s simply because she keeps reappearing in my life, and apparently to me alone, or perhaps it’s the reason behind those appearances that’s speaking to me. I snap as much visual detail as I can in this moment: Chapped lips. Petite. Taut skin. Tan. Bright eyes. Prominent cheekbones. Once beautiful. Lace-edged socks. Arm criss-crossed with dotted red lines. She snaps her chin down, following my glance, and places a gnarled hand over her scratches.
“Hello!” I try again, a little louder and with a broader smile.
The skin around her eyes crinkles and quivers, the way a horse twitches when flies are near. She resumes her muttering as she passes by me, but I can tell it’s not directed at me, not a reply. I’m disappointed. I think I must look too much like everyone else in my t-shirt and sweats, too homogenized. She can’t tell I’m a misfit, too. Most can’t, or so I hope; I work so earnestly at fitting in.
And suddenly I know why the sight of the Walking Woman has always stirred my heart. With her purposeful, flamboyant steps she treads the Wasteland holding high the torch of simply being. With each solitary stride she exudes the confidence that she is doing what she is supposed to do, and that she carries all of her importance inside of her. She radiates both peace and purpose. I watch her walk away, and it is as if she leaves me in a wake of light.
From peace comes purpose; from purpose, peace. How simple! No vigorous striving for outside validation, no frantic dashing from milestone to milestone, racking up accolades and relationships that please but fail to satiate. She walks as her given and accepted form of expression, to be who she is, to live her own truth – her inherent meaning, impervious to the ravages of age or weather or public opinion. Mad? Maybe. A misfit? Yes, and a beacon. Her transcendence, whatever its causes, nudges my soul. In both the Walking Woman and the barren woods, I see that simply existing as intended is living with purpose. Never mind that forms will molder by and by; there is in truth a beauty that will linger.
Namaste, I should say; it’s a word I must have heard in Santa Cruz, long ago. Somehow it has surfaced, unbidden, its meaning illuminated for me. I should say it; I think she’d get it. But by the time I think it, she is gone. The dead leaves stir and whirl, and then subside. The air blows ripe with damp earth and displaced silt. Ahead, a gray heron stands midstream on legs so fine it seems suspended over the still water, like a wisp of smoke that has settled into a long question mark.
I squeeze my eyes shut, looking at the light.
Published as "Desolation" in The Journey magazine, March-April 2011, p. 14 - print and online
It’s a gusty autumn evening in the woods near my home. Bare branches crackle the ochre sky, and loose leaves flap and flutter across my narrow path, darting and swooping before settling into silent drifts. Some sail down the current of the creek; one hangs upon the brittle web of a wiry shrub, trembling like a spider’s prey. I scuffle and crunch along, careful to avoid the burgundy legs of berry vines that sprawl and clamp across the trail. I’m ankle-deep in death.
Stumbling along in all this grief of landscape, the depression that has dogged me for the past few years prevails. I succumb to brooding on the transience of life: my father’s unjust death, my nearly empty nest, my so-called friend’s detachment -- my sense of immortality, purpose, and value – until I’m startled from my dreary thoughts by a muttering that spews from just around the bend. A ropey brown hand, mottled as the leaves, pushes aside the chapparal and a walnut face emerges, framed within a messy corona of long white hair.
I stop and step aside. I know her well, though only from afar. She is the Walking Woman, as I call her; the old gypsy lady of lackluster Almaden, who strides our suburban sidewalks in crepey tangerine and turquoise skirts that swish above her bobby socks and Keds. In her mid-seventies at the least, she paces resolutely, thrusting her pointed chin forward and her narrow shoulders back. She always walks alone. Despite the thick matting of her straight, shoulder-length hair, there is something coordinated in her comportment and clothing that connotes good health and cleanliness. She’s slender, tan, and fit, and no wonder; I’ve seen her in locations several miles apart, from dawn to dusk, and often enough to assume that she walks all day, every day. That, and her solitude and apparel, mark her as eccentric, and possibly mentally ill.
Still, something about her has always resonated with me, even when I first noticed her in my home town of Santa Cruz, a mountain range and thirty years away. Santa Cruz has always pulsed with interesting characters, and this was especially true in the 1970s, so I’ve never understood why her presence caught my self-centric teenage eye and stayed in my conscious memory long enough for me to recognize her so many decades later, here in Almaden. I’ve often asked my fellow residents if they know who she is or where she lives. Strangely, though she’s both ubiquitous and unique – far more the latter in this conformist community than in notoriously eclectic Santa Cruz -- no one else seems to have seen her, not even my husband. How can that be, I’ve puzzled, when she’s so distinctive? I’ve sometimes wondered if I might have made her up – if she is really there – but here she is.
“Hi,” I say, heart rushing, though I don’t yet know why.
These woods have always been my place of restoration, but today their nakedness has only added to my gloom. Surrounded by decay, the pallor of my own seeming insignificance reflects off every rotting thing. What difference do I make? Nature, after all, simply follows its predetermined patterns. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes understood: “That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Everything is the same as it ever was and ever will be. We are forever cycling toward demise.
I pick my son up from third grade with a blanket and a picnic and take him to the creek where I let him discover the deer trail leading down to its oak-shaded bank. When he sees the burbling water and the bobbing mallards and the tire swing he jumps up and down and yells “Cool! Wish I had my swim trunks!” I produce the desired item from my bottomless tote bag and he sheepishly mumbles “Aw, I love you, Mom.” He makes me turn around while he changes and then he plays for an hour and a half in the water, getting soaked, pushing stuff around with long bamboo poles, shrieking with delight. This is the moment that surges across my mind the day he stomps off to his dorm and tells me to leave him alone.
Dangling dry twigs tangle up my hair, and I trip over a fallen sycamore branch. The stubbed toe deepens my sulk. Why work so hard to forge trails few will follow, that soon will be grown over? Why care so much, when all is doomed to pass? I’m too aware that time rolls along relentlessly and undoes what we do, the achievements and pleasures and people we love. My mind is brimming with beloved moments that bite when I reach for them.
He packs up the coffee and cinnamon rolls and we set off at five o'clock in the morning, while the stars are still shining full strength. We crack our windows to let the raw morning slide in, untainted by traffic fumes or noises, filled only with the vociferous chorus of crickets chipping away at the darkness. I love the silence that connects us across the seat. He stretches out his hand, creased by years of groping around in autoshop engines and by farm labor, and wraps it around mine. We don’t say much until it starts to get light. We stop then, on the outskirts of a field, and have our sweet rolls while the sun hauls itself over the edge of the world. I don’t care much for fishing, or for fish. It’s the trip that matters, and my dad. I give him back these memories years later, as the cancer gnaws away at his lungs.
I pull away from the pain of the past, turning for consolation toward my stock list of hard-earned attributes. Today it brings no comfort . I realize that at forty-six, I’ve lost my sense of self beneath dozens of decency labels – Good Mother, Caring Friend, Diligent Student, Responsible Citizen, Valuable Employee – the mundane list goes on, to no effect. I’ve only plastered them on like bandages to hide my insecurities as I lurch, mummy-like, from goal to goal. With age and certain losses, they’ve begun to lose their glue and peel loose. Now my life is pervaded by the anxiety of exposure, the fear that soon everyone will see that there is nothing underneath. I am invisible to myself. The futility of slapping more labels over the void intensifies my depression. So does the fear of not doing so. Maybe I should be on medication.
The Walking Woman peers at me, eyes silver-blue and glinting through narrowed lids. Her muttering breaks off, but she doesn’t respond, or even pause. As she plunges down the trail toward me I’m increasingly certain that this encounter, however brief, will have some sort of significance for me. Perhaps it’s simply because she keeps reappearing in my life, and apparently to me alone, or perhaps it’s the reason behind those appearances that’s speaking to me. I snap as much visual detail as I can in this moment: Chapped lips. Petite. Taut skin. Tan. Bright eyes. Prominent cheekbones. Once beautiful. Lace-edged socks. Arm criss-crossed with dotted red lines. She snaps her chin down, following my glance, and places a gnarled hand over her scratches.
“Hello!” I try again, a little louder and with a broader smile.
The skin around her eyes crinkles and quivers, the way a horse twitches when flies are near. She resumes her muttering as she passes by me, but I can tell it’s not directed at me, not a reply. I’m disappointed. I think I must look too much like everyone else in my t-shirt and sweats, too homogenized. She can’t tell I’m a misfit, too. Most can’t, or so I hope; I work so earnestly at fitting in.
And suddenly I know why the sight of the Walking Woman has always stirred my heart. With her purposeful, flamboyant steps she treads the Wasteland holding high the torch of simply being. With each solitary stride she exudes the confidence that she is doing what she is supposed to do, and that she carries all of her importance inside of her. She radiates both peace and purpose. I watch her walk away, and it is as if she leaves me in a wake of light.
From peace comes purpose; from purpose, peace. How simple! No vigorous striving for outside validation, no frantic dashing from milestone to milestone, racking up accolades and relationships that please but fail to satiate. She walks as her given and accepted form of expression, to be who she is, to live her own truth – her inherent meaning, impervious to the ravages of age or weather or public opinion. Mad? Maybe. A misfit? Yes, and a beacon. Her transcendence, whatever its causes, nudges my soul. In both the Walking Woman and the barren woods, I see that simply existing as intended is living with purpose. Never mind that forms will molder by and by; there is in truth a beauty that will linger.
Namaste, I should say; it’s a word I must have heard in Santa Cruz, long ago. Somehow it has surfaced, unbidden, its meaning illuminated for me. I should say it; I think she’d get it. But by the time I think it, she is gone. The dead leaves stir and whirl, and then subside. The air blows ripe with damp earth and displaced silt. Ahead, a gray heron stands midstream on legs so fine it seems suspended over the still water, like a wisp of smoke that has settled into a long question mark.
I squeeze my eyes shut, looking at the light.
Observations After the Storm
Capitola Beach, 2018
It’s a sunny, chilly day in mid-February, and the shoreline is shining with late winter sun. The waves are quiet; the sea is subdued today, scribbling in long low lines of hydraulic handwriting. Last week it scrawled beach-filling loops one on top of the other, decipherable only as unrestrained emotion, an angry roar. Today’s waves are neat and compact, open to interpretation, requiring a closer read. Hovering seagulls dot i’s, flotsam and jetsam from last week’s storm cross t’s. Some lines speak louder than others, in italics of falling foam; most ripple in faded strokes on the silver-blue page.
I turn to the right and look toward the mouth of the creek. Upstream, before it approaches the beach, its high current has wiped the banks of brush clean, like pink-beige gums, revealing paint-chipped, uneven pickets of old jagged pilings. The stormwood that came down the creek last night is piled deep on the sand in shades of old metal: tin, rusty aluminum, old silver, bronze. Dozens of children in neon colors clamber over the rustic tones, treasure seekers building forts and teepees from debris, attended by parents in equally plastic brights. Their faces blend in with the sand and wood, but their clothing stands out like confetti. A pink parka with white fur trim bounces over a woodpile, followed by an orange Gortext vest. Someone has pitched a lime nylon tent in a patch of open sand, and from its front flap emerge a cherry red slicker and an electric blue windbreaker. Protection from the cold must somehow depend on defiant, unnatural palettes.
It’s a weekend, so the iPhones are out, devices I rarely see until tourists arrive. Despite the temperature, four teen girls strip down to bikinis and take several selfies. They're here to awe and lure boys, and as they venture into the foamy surf, their shrieks amplify the invitation. A man kneels on the shore to shoot pictures of seagulls, all of them silent, each standing on one leg on the shimmering shore, reflecting earthbound inversions on its tarnished mirror. A girl stands on the beach, panning back and forth with an iPad, taking a video of waves. Mothers of toddlers are capturing scenes they’ll never see again—or now, since they’re peering at screens.
Apple seems to own the attention of the whole crowd, hauling the moments of their lives up into the cloud, while the actual living of them hides under their thumbs.
Capitola Beach, 2018
It’s a sunny, chilly day in mid-February, and the shoreline is shining with late winter sun. The waves are quiet; the sea is subdued today, scribbling in long low lines of hydraulic handwriting. Last week it scrawled beach-filling loops one on top of the other, decipherable only as unrestrained emotion, an angry roar. Today’s waves are neat and compact, open to interpretation, requiring a closer read. Hovering seagulls dot i’s, flotsam and jetsam from last week’s storm cross t’s. Some lines speak louder than others, in italics of falling foam; most ripple in faded strokes on the silver-blue page.
I turn to the right and look toward the mouth of the creek. Upstream, before it approaches the beach, its high current has wiped the banks of brush clean, like pink-beige gums, revealing paint-chipped, uneven pickets of old jagged pilings. The stormwood that came down the creek last night is piled deep on the sand in shades of old metal: tin, rusty aluminum, old silver, bronze. Dozens of children in neon colors clamber over the rustic tones, treasure seekers building forts and teepees from debris, attended by parents in equally plastic brights. Their faces blend in with the sand and wood, but their clothing stands out like confetti. A pink parka with white fur trim bounces over a woodpile, followed by an orange Gortext vest. Someone has pitched a lime nylon tent in a patch of open sand, and from its front flap emerge a cherry red slicker and an electric blue windbreaker. Protection from the cold must somehow depend on defiant, unnatural palettes.
It’s a weekend, so the iPhones are out, devices I rarely see until tourists arrive. Despite the temperature, four teen girls strip down to bikinis and take several selfies. They're here to awe and lure boys, and as they venture into the foamy surf, their shrieks amplify the invitation. A man kneels on the shore to shoot pictures of seagulls, all of them silent, each standing on one leg on the shimmering shore, reflecting earthbound inversions on its tarnished mirror. A girl stands on the beach, panning back and forth with an iPad, taking a video of waves. Mothers of toddlers are capturing scenes they’ll never see again—or now, since they’re peering at screens.
Apple seems to own the attention of the whole crowd, hauling the moments of their lives up into the cloud, while the actual living of them hides under their thumbs.
Perfection
2010
If art and poetry are the finest expressions of humanity, a tree must be the finest of nature. “I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree,” Joyce Kilmer wrote a century ago. For years I’ve assumed he meant that a tree was lovelier than a poem, but perhaps he meant that a tree is a poem, the very best kind of poem, the kind that is lovely and meaningful in quietly powerful ways. That trees look lovely is self evident. To drive along a mountain road beset with redwoods, from which boughs of golden maples burst like shards of yellow glass, is to meander through a million sonnets. But trees, like poems, convey more than mere charm. By the subtle arrangement of images, poems reveal invincible truths. By the effortless generation of abundance, trees embody the essence of being.
Whether we consciously recognize this essence or not, trees serve to soothe and sway our thoughts. Scientists at Texas A&M have proven that being near trees can make blood pressure drop and muscles relax within moments. And according to Dr. Rachel Kaplan, a professor at the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan and the author of several books about the psychological effect of nature on urban environments, crime rates descend by as much as fifty-two percent in apartment buildings surrounded by trees. What science proves, the poets have long known: “One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man, / Or moral evil and of good, / Than all the ages can,” wrote Wordsworth.
Dr. Kaplan and her protégées also discovered that cancer patients who were exposed to trees for twenty minutes a day improved much more than patients who were not. We scarcely need a study to convince us. Empirical evidence aside, who can stand under branches flung out against the sun, and see the musky light trickling down through backlit leaves, and not feel a responsive glow? How can a dappled forest trail dissipate a melancholic mood? When we stand under trees, do we somehow feel as if they understand?
Perhaps we sense a kinship with these woody perennials. We are, after all, aligned in many physical and metaphoric ways, beginning with our homonymous parts: ovaries, teeth, limbs, knees, lobes, ribs, crowns, and sinuses. We must find mates to reproduce ourselves. Trees and humans stem from fertile pods in similar stages, each embryo subsisting on the food contained inside its seed or sac. Once outside, we’re rooted to the earth, but headed for the sky. Hormones control our growth and form, and circumstances give us unique shapes. Memory serves to protect us: if winds buffet us, we grow sturdier. Many of us have a phototropic yearning for the light, and all of us need water. Our fluids move through vessels to carry nutrients to our extremities. Sometimes we wilt; sometimes we bloom. We drip when we are wounded, and we scar. Parasites plague us throughout our lives. The marks of age deface our bark or skin -- and the crowns of men can be deciduous. We must maintain our balance, or we topple. Storms sometimes disarrange the way we stand, but if our roots are strong we hold our ground, and as we grow older, our outer selves turn inward, becoming the heartwood, the strong-as-steel core that holds us up.
Analogies aside, the botanical and biological overlapping of our forms intrigued Charles Darwin, who proved that if it gives a plant some advantage, it can move its parts independently. The Austrian botanist Raoul France went so far as to say that plants could move as freely and gracefully as any animal or human, but at nearly imperceptible speeds; that they reach, bend, shiver, spur, devour, repel, twirl, burrow, unfurl, and feel. In his classic and controversial 1973 work The Secret Life of Plants, author Peter Tompkins describes Cleve Backster’s discoveries that electrodes attached to plants recorded emotional responses to violence, or even violent thoughts. Could this mean that trees are linked to animals? Recent discoveries are equally compelling. In the Santa Cruz mountains, Stanford researchers are studying sixty mysterious albino redwoods -- weak, white mutations that only live on “mother trunks” because they lack the clorophyll, chemicals, wide vessels, and growth rate needed to thrive on their own. When water is scarce, the “mother” cuts off the supply; when it rains again the ghostly saplings return, dependent little suckers that rise and fall with the weather. The presence of these everwhites may resurrect Backster’s much-belittled ideas, for total albinism is primarily an animal trait, one usually fatal to plants.
Whether trees are sentient or not, they care for us in ways we cannot live without. Besides providing peace, they make and clean the very air we breathe. A forest acre, in a single year, puts out four tons of oxygen and soaks up six tons of carbon dioxide -- enough to sustain eighteen people. An acre of woodland purifies polluted air by attracting and filtering or absorbing more than twenty-three million tons of dust, smoke, fumes, and microbes. Trees absorb and release water as well, cooling our atmosphere; a single birch takes in as much as four hundred quarts of water in a day. Trees also give us food and medicine, shade and shelter, humus and windbreaks. Of course, we’re not the only beneficiaries of trees: one mature oak can host almost a hundred kinds of mosses, fungi, ferns, and lichen, and it can feed nearly three hundred species of insects, including ladybugs, weevils, wasps, butterflies, spiders, and moths. Its ninety thousand annual acorns will nourish raccoons, chipmunks, squirrels, birds, and mice, and will generate abundantly more trees. As Emerson so eloquently said, “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
Even posthumously, trees provide for us -- furniture, lumber and paper top the product list – and for other living things. A lifeless trunk lends footing to a vine, which vivifies its corpse with borrowed color. A rotting log offers cavities for birds, safety for mice, shade for snakes, moisture for salamanders, and nutrients for saplings. Sometimes a dead tree falls against its neighbor as if it has fainted and been caught; prevented from landing on soil, the hollow limbs become a high haven for skunks, bats, possums, and more. The physical contributions of trees to our planet are critical and profuse. The physical contributions of trees to humans are absolutely requisite for our existence, for they are the means by which we eat and breathe and live.
Trees calm our minds and sustain our bodies, but some feel they provide for our souls as well. “When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees,” wrote Seneca two thousand years ago, “higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?” The apotheosis of trees is central to every ancient religion. The biblical book of Genesis features the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; the Druid legends feature sacred oaks and yews; the Norse myths feature Yggdrasil, the World Tree that holds together Earth and feels its pain. The pagans, though, first saw in nature the divine. “No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples,” said the eminent naturalist John Muir, “and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.”
Whether sacred or not, trees can, like poems, convey transformational truths. One of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century, J.R.R. Tolkien, saw them not only as topics and tropes, but as metaphors for his own art, for the creation of enchantment and the enchantment of creation. His attitude was not just academic. He loved to be with them, says biographer Humphrey Carpenter; “He would climb them, lean against them, even talk to them.” At his most emotional he thought of himself in treelike terms; when his good friend C.S. Lewis died, Tolkien lamented to his daughter that “So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man my age–like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an ax blow near the roots.”
Our sacred and literary histories imply that even the nearness of trees can transform princes into buddhas and shepherds into poets. I have no Petrarchan delusions, but even my own poor muse has been aroused by trees. When I was ten, for instance, a grand old apple tree grew in a swale of our hillside orchard, a yellow bellflower planted by the Italian immigrants who had settled the farm a century before. Its enormous branches arched and draped to the ground like the bustled skirt of an elegant giantess, and every day after school I’d take a blanket and a book, a notepad and a pen, and enter through a leafy slit. The earth inside was soft beneath a constant layer of winter leaves, and in springtime the dangling twigs billowed with creamy blossoms and bright new foliage, suffusing the air with chartreuse light and the fragrance of incipient fruit. I would sit and ponder what Whitman, in “Song of the Open Road,” had put in words: “Why are there trees I never walk under, but large and melodious thoughts / descend upon me?” The bellflower formed a bower from the pages of fairy tales, and it fueled the ones I penned beneath that tree.
In comparison to that simple living bower, the grandest cathedral is static, dead; it cannot function other than as space. No column, carved or sculpted, can emulate the presence and power of a living pillar, constantly creating and strengthening itself. Inside conifers and broadleaves, the fine sheath of cambium that stretches between the upward xylem and downward phloem vessels is ever adding more tissue to each, simultaneously nourishing and thickening and strengthening the trunk. In fact, as the oldest xylem deep in the center of the tree is crushed by the crowding of added tissue, it turns to heartwood, adding strength. Our buildings, for all their craftsmanship and beauty, are dead, and their dry skeletons are destined to crumble. But age does not decay a growing tree. “Eternal God,” a 12,000-year-old sequoia sempervirens in California thought to be the world’s oldest tree, especially exemplifies this truth. Trees grow, strengthen, and reproduce themselves while constantly providing for the planet.
Despite the earth’s dependence on the proliferation and providence of trees, they work their essential wonders without working at all. Trees never plan, toil, worry, try, or do. They simply are. Each species is exactly what it is -- a bonsai never strives to be a palm – and each receives and provides without the least endeavor. They model the natural law of abundance upon which the psalmist meditates with delight, “like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.”
Trees awed the youthful Carl Jung, for whom they seemed “direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life.” Is it not those very embodiments, though, that make that meaning comprehensible? In their effortless existence, well-provisioned purpose, and momentous meaning, do not trees show us how to simply be? If “Eternal God,” for instance, did not still serve a purpose, it would have toppled over long ago. If it had ever lacked a drop it truly needed, it would not still be standing. Every tree has exactly what it needs to exist and produce, or it would not exist or produce.
I think the same is true for human beings, and in this truth I see the perfection of every tree, the poetic meaning and sacred profundity of its effortless existence. Like fine poetry, trees make us subtly conscious of deep meaning. Their presence richly illuminates our inherent value. This truth is what imparts a sense of peace. Posthumously, trees give us mere products, but alive, they endow us with awareness: You exist to be you. I exist to be me. And every tree exists to be that tree.
2010
If art and poetry are the finest expressions of humanity, a tree must be the finest of nature. “I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree,” Joyce Kilmer wrote a century ago. For years I’ve assumed he meant that a tree was lovelier than a poem, but perhaps he meant that a tree is a poem, the very best kind of poem, the kind that is lovely and meaningful in quietly powerful ways. That trees look lovely is self evident. To drive along a mountain road beset with redwoods, from which boughs of golden maples burst like shards of yellow glass, is to meander through a million sonnets. But trees, like poems, convey more than mere charm. By the subtle arrangement of images, poems reveal invincible truths. By the effortless generation of abundance, trees embody the essence of being.
Whether we consciously recognize this essence or not, trees serve to soothe and sway our thoughts. Scientists at Texas A&M have proven that being near trees can make blood pressure drop and muscles relax within moments. And according to Dr. Rachel Kaplan, a professor at the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan and the author of several books about the psychological effect of nature on urban environments, crime rates descend by as much as fifty-two percent in apartment buildings surrounded by trees. What science proves, the poets have long known: “One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man, / Or moral evil and of good, / Than all the ages can,” wrote Wordsworth.
Dr. Kaplan and her protégées also discovered that cancer patients who were exposed to trees for twenty minutes a day improved much more than patients who were not. We scarcely need a study to convince us. Empirical evidence aside, who can stand under branches flung out against the sun, and see the musky light trickling down through backlit leaves, and not feel a responsive glow? How can a dappled forest trail dissipate a melancholic mood? When we stand under trees, do we somehow feel as if they understand?
Perhaps we sense a kinship with these woody perennials. We are, after all, aligned in many physical and metaphoric ways, beginning with our homonymous parts: ovaries, teeth, limbs, knees, lobes, ribs, crowns, and sinuses. We must find mates to reproduce ourselves. Trees and humans stem from fertile pods in similar stages, each embryo subsisting on the food contained inside its seed or sac. Once outside, we’re rooted to the earth, but headed for the sky. Hormones control our growth and form, and circumstances give us unique shapes. Memory serves to protect us: if winds buffet us, we grow sturdier. Many of us have a phototropic yearning for the light, and all of us need water. Our fluids move through vessels to carry nutrients to our extremities. Sometimes we wilt; sometimes we bloom. We drip when we are wounded, and we scar. Parasites plague us throughout our lives. The marks of age deface our bark or skin -- and the crowns of men can be deciduous. We must maintain our balance, or we topple. Storms sometimes disarrange the way we stand, but if our roots are strong we hold our ground, and as we grow older, our outer selves turn inward, becoming the heartwood, the strong-as-steel core that holds us up.
Analogies aside, the botanical and biological overlapping of our forms intrigued Charles Darwin, who proved that if it gives a plant some advantage, it can move its parts independently. The Austrian botanist Raoul France went so far as to say that plants could move as freely and gracefully as any animal or human, but at nearly imperceptible speeds; that they reach, bend, shiver, spur, devour, repel, twirl, burrow, unfurl, and feel. In his classic and controversial 1973 work The Secret Life of Plants, author Peter Tompkins describes Cleve Backster’s discoveries that electrodes attached to plants recorded emotional responses to violence, or even violent thoughts. Could this mean that trees are linked to animals? Recent discoveries are equally compelling. In the Santa Cruz mountains, Stanford researchers are studying sixty mysterious albino redwoods -- weak, white mutations that only live on “mother trunks” because they lack the clorophyll, chemicals, wide vessels, and growth rate needed to thrive on their own. When water is scarce, the “mother” cuts off the supply; when it rains again the ghostly saplings return, dependent little suckers that rise and fall with the weather. The presence of these everwhites may resurrect Backster’s much-belittled ideas, for total albinism is primarily an animal trait, one usually fatal to plants.
Whether trees are sentient or not, they care for us in ways we cannot live without. Besides providing peace, they make and clean the very air we breathe. A forest acre, in a single year, puts out four tons of oxygen and soaks up six tons of carbon dioxide -- enough to sustain eighteen people. An acre of woodland purifies polluted air by attracting and filtering or absorbing more than twenty-three million tons of dust, smoke, fumes, and microbes. Trees absorb and release water as well, cooling our atmosphere; a single birch takes in as much as four hundred quarts of water in a day. Trees also give us food and medicine, shade and shelter, humus and windbreaks. Of course, we’re not the only beneficiaries of trees: one mature oak can host almost a hundred kinds of mosses, fungi, ferns, and lichen, and it can feed nearly three hundred species of insects, including ladybugs, weevils, wasps, butterflies, spiders, and moths. Its ninety thousand annual acorns will nourish raccoons, chipmunks, squirrels, birds, and mice, and will generate abundantly more trees. As Emerson so eloquently said, “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
Even posthumously, trees provide for us -- furniture, lumber and paper top the product list – and for other living things. A lifeless trunk lends footing to a vine, which vivifies its corpse with borrowed color. A rotting log offers cavities for birds, safety for mice, shade for snakes, moisture for salamanders, and nutrients for saplings. Sometimes a dead tree falls against its neighbor as if it has fainted and been caught; prevented from landing on soil, the hollow limbs become a high haven for skunks, bats, possums, and more. The physical contributions of trees to our planet are critical and profuse. The physical contributions of trees to humans are absolutely requisite for our existence, for they are the means by which we eat and breathe and live.
Trees calm our minds and sustain our bodies, but some feel they provide for our souls as well. “When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees,” wrote Seneca two thousand years ago, “higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?” The apotheosis of trees is central to every ancient religion. The biblical book of Genesis features the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; the Druid legends feature sacred oaks and yews; the Norse myths feature Yggdrasil, the World Tree that holds together Earth and feels its pain. The pagans, though, first saw in nature the divine. “No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples,” said the eminent naturalist John Muir, “and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.”
Whether sacred or not, trees can, like poems, convey transformational truths. One of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century, J.R.R. Tolkien, saw them not only as topics and tropes, but as metaphors for his own art, for the creation of enchantment and the enchantment of creation. His attitude was not just academic. He loved to be with them, says biographer Humphrey Carpenter; “He would climb them, lean against them, even talk to them.” At his most emotional he thought of himself in treelike terms; when his good friend C.S. Lewis died, Tolkien lamented to his daughter that “So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man my age–like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an ax blow near the roots.”
Our sacred and literary histories imply that even the nearness of trees can transform princes into buddhas and shepherds into poets. I have no Petrarchan delusions, but even my own poor muse has been aroused by trees. When I was ten, for instance, a grand old apple tree grew in a swale of our hillside orchard, a yellow bellflower planted by the Italian immigrants who had settled the farm a century before. Its enormous branches arched and draped to the ground like the bustled skirt of an elegant giantess, and every day after school I’d take a blanket and a book, a notepad and a pen, and enter through a leafy slit. The earth inside was soft beneath a constant layer of winter leaves, and in springtime the dangling twigs billowed with creamy blossoms and bright new foliage, suffusing the air with chartreuse light and the fragrance of incipient fruit. I would sit and ponder what Whitman, in “Song of the Open Road,” had put in words: “Why are there trees I never walk under, but large and melodious thoughts / descend upon me?” The bellflower formed a bower from the pages of fairy tales, and it fueled the ones I penned beneath that tree.
In comparison to that simple living bower, the grandest cathedral is static, dead; it cannot function other than as space. No column, carved or sculpted, can emulate the presence and power of a living pillar, constantly creating and strengthening itself. Inside conifers and broadleaves, the fine sheath of cambium that stretches between the upward xylem and downward phloem vessels is ever adding more tissue to each, simultaneously nourishing and thickening and strengthening the trunk. In fact, as the oldest xylem deep in the center of the tree is crushed by the crowding of added tissue, it turns to heartwood, adding strength. Our buildings, for all their craftsmanship and beauty, are dead, and their dry skeletons are destined to crumble. But age does not decay a growing tree. “Eternal God,” a 12,000-year-old sequoia sempervirens in California thought to be the world’s oldest tree, especially exemplifies this truth. Trees grow, strengthen, and reproduce themselves while constantly providing for the planet.
Despite the earth’s dependence on the proliferation and providence of trees, they work their essential wonders without working at all. Trees never plan, toil, worry, try, or do. They simply are. Each species is exactly what it is -- a bonsai never strives to be a palm – and each receives and provides without the least endeavor. They model the natural law of abundance upon which the psalmist meditates with delight, “like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.”
Trees awed the youthful Carl Jung, for whom they seemed “direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life.” Is it not those very embodiments, though, that make that meaning comprehensible? In their effortless existence, well-provisioned purpose, and momentous meaning, do not trees show us how to simply be? If “Eternal God,” for instance, did not still serve a purpose, it would have toppled over long ago. If it had ever lacked a drop it truly needed, it would not still be standing. Every tree has exactly what it needs to exist and produce, or it would not exist or produce.
I think the same is true for human beings, and in this truth I see the perfection of every tree, the poetic meaning and sacred profundity of its effortless existence. Like fine poetry, trees make us subtly conscious of deep meaning. Their presence richly illuminates our inherent value. This truth is what imparts a sense of peace. Posthumously, trees give us mere products, but alive, they endow us with awareness: You exist to be you. I exist to be me. And every tree exists to be that tree.