It is one of the sweetest things, the anticipation of summer. Stepping outside to sunny skies bright and blue. A gentle breeze and the spotted shadow of leaves providing breaks to the warm air. The jangle of ice as I sip cool and refreshing lemon water. Little beetles shimmering black and bronze scurrying over freshly dug dirt dusted on roots rising from the ground.
When I go, I’d be pleased to go as I see this tree of mine, of Earth’s go. I am not sure of the tree’s experience, its past and its sentiments as sugar and water slowly course up and down it. Maybe the fungus eating away its trunk hurts. Maybe it is lonely with no elders or offspring near by to trade with and speak to. Maybe, probably. A slow death is a hard one, sickness growing and consuming. But trees are lucky, misused and abused as they are by us, they are unrelentingly rich in life. The vastness of habitat they provide is hard for me to grasp even when I think on it.
This tree sitting solidly in the corner of our yard comes down Thursday. It has been looming over our house evermore sick and dangerous, a fright in high winds blowing in with seasonal storms. Reluctant as I was to make the call, it is time. A time that always comes through human hands or not. Cut down and stump ground until this life giving tree is left to slowly, hopefully, stop living. No family around to sustain it, it will die. It is its time.
You know not, I suppose, what this tree means to me. It has been hard to admit to the humans around me. Often all I will say is that I love this tree but no more than that. I suppose it is time as well, to explain what this love means.
It has been three years this tree and I have been building our relationship. I was looking for a good tree when we were moving last. Something to provide shade, with leaves to lie under and look up at, entrancing me with their sway and dance, flashing in the wind and light. This tree next in the yard of this house tickled those dreams. A Chinese tallow that must be old, a hundred years maybe, as the trunk is two some feet across.
When we moved this tree appeared healthy and in its prime. When spring and summer came that first year its canopy was full. I am peculiarly picky about leaves. For a long while I disregarded live oaks. Another prolific type of tree in this area. Aside from those that could impress me with their sprawl they bothered me. I have a distaste for small, dark and waxy leaves (I now find live oaks enchanting but that is a new sentiment). But this Chinese tallow has thin leaves, the tops a rich bright green and the bottoms, yellow and lime as the sun filters through. The leaves are both round and then pointy, whimsical. And in the fall, well winter here, they turn yellow, orange, and red. Following the wind they release from the branches and carpet our yard with color. I am a less is more gardener, both for ease and for beauty. The leaves were never raked or bagged, they returned to the solid they grew from. Was it that first year or the the second when I was given a hammock. Regardless, it has been a bit now that I have had a hammock to spend random hours rocking sleepily under this tree.
In some time, maybe a year after moving here, things got more serious between me and this tree. As I was trying to find my roots in Earth, extending the concept of me down into the ground below to steady myself, this tree seemed like an obvious friend to have. It might have started with meditation. Slipping outside in the early morning to sit below its canopy and find the moments between my mind. It was then I really started to heal. As life shifted and my routine broke I came out to this tree each morning for just a moment, for just a few deep breaths.
With a deep breath I will share the truth about what these stolen moments meant to me. It is a hard thing for me to do but so is dying. I will tell you my story with gratitude, hope and courage since this is how I pray for the tree to relinquish this iteration of its life.
In my heart I am a healer. I will allow you your interpretation of such a claim, I know it is a complicated term, with a complicated history in a complicated world. For right now, I will provide you only with a brief explanation of what I feel and who I am.
First and for a long time now, I have been healing myself. Constant and undeniable the urge and power to do so bubbles up from within me. I have been healing pains from this life and pains from past lives. Too, I have been healing harm, lots of harm from me to others. After years of this work, I find gentler and more generous spaces within me.
I couldn’t name what this pull towards truth and growth meant to me until one day a couple of years ago. I stood by a conifer in green and wet mountains. It was towering with a large trunk and had the type of coniferous leaves that make me pause in awe. The soft and feathery type that splay wide then more narrow as they grow. In my wonder I reached out and rested my hand on its fluffy bark. I felt a connection with that touch. Magic stirred in me and I funneled it to this big, life giving tree. It was love and it was beyond the material.
Mentally, I have no idea of what healing means when it is only the intangible and undefinable. My body, however, is drawn to it and trusts in its power without a need for conceptual understanding. My mind can always be directed to rest knowing that if nothing else, there is astounding beauty in the healing’s intention. For one creature to reach to another with the purpose to bless life loved so dearly by one upon the other is beautiful.
While that moment with that tree far from here opened me to my power for healing, it wasn’t the conifers work I opened to, it was the tallows. The healing magic I connect to isn’t mine but something shared between Earth and her beings. This aging Chinese tallow with round leaves that end in a point, guided my way into the glistening and living web strung between life and Earth. When I returned to this tree, daily I would come and stand under its branches, close by its trunk on the left side, always the left side and reach my right arm, often my right arm out, palm wide and flat on its gray and ridged bark. I would take deep breaths. Three to draw in the sun and air. The welcome promise of each day. Three to push out what I collected into my tree. Not a tree that is mine but a tree that holds a place in my heart and I, I believe, a place in its. In the same way that others can be my son, my friend or my lover, this tree too is mine.
I got pregnant, had a baby and lived my life. This ritual stayed. It changed over time but most days I come to share love with my tree. Once in the morning. I take a breath in for and out for the tree. Then I take one in and out for me. Filling us both with the gift of the start of the day. Next is a prayer, one for my tree, one for me. And then again I return at night, five breaths to release my day ending in a pause to give thanks.
Will you believe me when I tell you my tree nourished me into the me I finally fully love? Well it doesn’t matter if you do. It my tree and mine’s most intimate and sure truth.
And that is just me. Imagine all the squirrels, birds, ants, spiders, and mice. The fungi and microbes. Imagine all the life nourished and sheltered by my tallow.
Really it is fitting, love and life from one invasive species to another in this deep American south.
I am at peace. A sadness stirring inside me but one surrounded by the surety that is the rhythm of life and death. This tallow’s life has been lonely and rich as a backyard tree, no forrest for company but creatures abounding and near none the less. These final days it has rested in the sweet and bright spring. Life abounding and diversifying as the Earth it shares is returned to meadow. Tall grasses and leafy flowering weeds climbing and stretching on each other. Snakes, lizards, beetles, flies, bees, and butterflies sheltered and alive. Round and pointy leaves sprouting forth in final small clusters tickled by the wind and fed but the sun. And I am here. Full of more gratitude than ever. This tree poured its power into me and I lean against it now filled with strength and clarity. So much has been healed. I used to only dream of such peach that now lives within me well like and deep. To the tree that taught me my spirit, thank you.