It is like the scent of freshly mown grass, aged for a hundred of years until it is clean deep wise warm green.
After a storm the other day I found some large oak leaves on the ground at McCorkle Place. I tucked three into the notebook I carry in my purse, which lately serves more as a receptacle for found leaves and feathers than as a notebook.
I thought it might be interesting to play with some printing using the leaves. When I got home that evening and opened the notebook to retrieve them, the scent of the leaves burst out and overtook me.
Now, when I walk through McCorkle Place, I can pick out the oak smell.
I imagine I will become an inveterate leaf sniffer now.
I had a nice dinner at my friend’s new house tonight. I took my Vitamix over and made Krank Juice while he whipped up some vegetables we ate with soba.
This was the word that kept coming to my mind over the weekend: respite.
First, the heat broke. It will be back up to 93°F tomorrow, and I’ll close the windows and turn the A/C on before I go to work tomorrow. But since Friday afternoon, the windows have been open, letting in fresh air and cicada song.
Second, I took an unplanned rest retreat. The only souls I spoke to from Friday at 5pm until this morning at 9:45am were my cats. And they aren’t very good conversationalists. I didn’t play any music, except for a drumming recording last night as I was preparing for bed. After working for a little while on Saturday morning, I mostly avoided the computer, except to watch a documentary Saturday night. I read. I slept. I went feral and loved my silence, solitude, and the smell of the crooks of my elbows. By Sunday evening, I felt recharged enough to take on some neglected cleaning projects. I finally took care of a fairly large energy/emotion suck from my downstairs that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to dismantle in the aftermath of a recent relationship end/shift/change. I feel home in my home again.
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Walking across McCorkle Place this evening, I stopped at Dancer the oak and gathered some of the sawdust still in little piles beneath her. I crouched at her foot and leaned my back against her trunk, observing mushrooms poking up through the mulch.
Ah, the mushroom connection…. le-champignon… that’s another story for later (and/or years ago and possibly still buried somewhere around this site…). What struck me about them today was how the mushrooms themselves are fairly soft and squishy, usually velvety to the touch. Yet suddenly, here they are, appearing to have silently exploded from the earth when I wasn’t looking. Mulch and soil are pushed aside like so much rubble.
I was quickly beset by vicious mosquitoes, so I did not linger with Dancer and the mushrooms. I did notice, however, that her fallen limb was purposefully cut. I assume this would not have been done without good reason, but the fact that it was done in such a way that two lower limbs were damaged made me a bit angry. So it goes. Breathe it out and inhale perspective. How many of my lifetimes would fit in the lifetime of that tree right now? How many of me would fit inside her trunk? What are my concerns really worth? The answer is so faint it passes like one leaf scuttling across the brick path.
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After work I went grocery shopping and was once again astounded at how expensive it is to eat the healthy food I do these days—mainly fresh organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. And some cottage cheese, maple nut Clif bars, and cherry Larabars. Oh yes, and frozen Indian entrees. I’m not that virtuous. I am very grateful that I can afford my diet. I couldn’t afford to eat this way before January, and there are a billion ways things could unfold. I don’t assume I’ll always be able to afford it.
Part of the weekend’s unplanned retreat was avoiding the grocery story by raiding the freezer and pantry for some older staple foods like pasta and some frozen vegetables. I love pasta, but I can notice a big difference in how I feel after a big bowl of pasta versus a VitaMix full of grapes, celery, kale, and apple. I just note this and appreciate the fact that I can keep myself well-stocked with fresh bright things to eat if I deign to leave my house.
Speaking of being grateful for good food, I started The Fruitful Darkness this weekend. It is written in a somewhat revelatory tone, but most of what she is saying is not news to me. Animals and trees deserve respect? We are all connected at the root of things? Yes. Being reminded doesn’t hurt, but seeing animals and trees is a better reminder than reading it in a book. A number of things I’d like to read more about seem like mere sketches. All that said, I’m still reading it, so I’m getting something out of it. I mention it here because it includes this Zen gatha by Thich Nhat Hanh, to be recited before eating:
In this plate of food,
I see the entire universe
supporting my existence.
I have a fairly visceral negative reaction to being asked to stop and say something, or listen to someone else say something, before I eat. This comes from years of being forced to hold hands before sitting down to eat in order to listen to someone ramble on to/about the “heavenly father,” who had the power to “bless the hands that prepared this food and the hands that brought it to us,” and to bestow “traveling mercies” on anyone who would be leaving after the meal. There is nothing offensive in the literal experience of this, but it taps a much-deeper vein of memory of assimilation by the Southern Baptist Borg at a time when resistance was truly futile. The quoted phrases above are enough to make me want to kick something if I dwell on them for a moment or two.
These days my practice is to push right into harmless things to which I have a knee-jerk negative reaction. This is what led to me doing karaoke “I Wanna Be Sedated” in my friend’s yard a few months ago. I do not do karaoke, see. Oh yeah? I’ll show me.
The above gatha resonates just enough that it may be the thing to deflate my pre-meal blessings reaction. We’ll see. If I can remember to think about it. Speaking of mental lapses, I apparently forgot I ordered The Fruitful Darkness and ordered it again, because I now have two copies.
I came to my computer to post something else from the book, and talk of food got me off track. This is unattributed on p. 157, and I love it:
Soil for legs
Axe for hands
Flower for eyes
Bird for ears
Mushroom for nose
Smile for mouth
Songs for lungs
Sweat for skin
Wind for mind
As I slowly drove the winding narrow road home from the grocery this evening, a hawk flew low across the street. Right in front of my car he seemed to transition from head-first laser-targeting to talons-first landing in the woods. All I really caught a glimpse of were barred tail feathers spread out as he disappeared behind foliage.
Treasures, all around… magic things…
God made love to me,
Soothed away my gravity,
Gave me a pair of angel wings,
Clear vision and some magic things.
God is love to me.
Thank you for those things.
Understand the world we’re living in—
Love can mean anything.
Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
When I was a child, I named the trees around our various houses ((One year we had four in three states. Sequentially, not simultaneously.)) and had a ritual of walking to each of them and saying hello. In fourth grade I wanted to be a dryad. I wrote something for school in which the main character was a dryad. I don’t remember anything about the plot, but I do remember my teacher marking off points because, he commented, you cannot just make up words like “dryad.” ((In studying library and information science, I have learned it will actually get you cited a lot if you make up new words.)) I tried to explain to no avail, and remember this moment clearly—a snapshot of impotent frustration and rage.
Over 680 taxa were cataloged. The number reflects the building foundation shrubs and small trees. However, the essence of McCorkle resides in the splendid diversity of noble trees anchored by the Quercus alba, white oak, with 88% (22/25) rated “high” and three “moderate”. These white oaks may parallel in age those on Polk Place. The exciting aspect is the exceedingly vibrant health of these trees. Canopies were full and dense, foliage saturated blue-green, leaves plump and oversized, bark and trunks without wounds and abrasions.
At least 15 Quercus taxa were identified at McCorkle. In fact, the genus constitutes 54% of the total trees. The three Quercus michauxii (could be Q. montana), swamp chestnut oak, are magnificent. …
…McCorkle should never be cluttered with small-stature trees. The great boles of the noble trees, the canopies providing cooling shade, architectural winter silhouettes, subtle to riotous fall colors, early fresh green from the Liriodendron to the mouse-ear-gray and -pink of the Quercus alba…Heaven-sent. McCorkle only needs tweaking.
All of that and it’s the cement-filled Davie Poplar that gets everybody’s attention.
I consider mindfully walking through this space to be part of my spiritual practice. Of course, some days I miss it completely because I am trying to explain things to a maladaptive introject or planning my work tasks for the day. But most days I am silently saying hello to the trees, thanking them for their lush shade, and feeling the places in the brick path where their roots create subtle bumps.
Family portrait
In April, there were many “small-stature trees.” They sprang up where the large-stature trees had dropped their acorns. I’m not sure what was done to them, but it wasn’t friendly, because the areas beneath the trees were soon covered in neat, clean mulch with no fresh green popping through.
Looking out at the big wide world
Over time names have come into my head for some of the trees. One is Jonah. My favorite is Dancer, the “mom” in the above family portrait. I was slightly horrified on Monday to come upon her surrounded by caution tape, one of her limbs cut into pieces on the ground beneath her. Her large lower limb ((the one on which a barred owl perched and stared me down while being pecked by mockingbirds)) now has a scar from this higher limb’s fall.
Jonah's foot
There are certain things that come up time and again in my own personal mythologizing (or psychologizing), and thus my dreams, my art, and my words. Trees are one of them, which is not surprising given the richness of tree symbolism across world cultures. It is time for me to begin writing about these symbols and themes in a more organized manner than I have in the past, so this may be the first in a series of personal mythology posts. We’ll see. ((I have taken to saying this a lot in the past year, usually with a smile, and always thinking about the linked story.))
At any rate, two lovely tree-related things that have nothing to do with me except that I’ve purchased them:
Intricately drawn visions of trees fill the pages of this sumptuous book of art and folklore from the Gond tribe in central India. In Gond belief, trees stand in the middle of life, and the spirit of many things lie in them. They are busy all day, giving shade and support and shelter and food to all. Only when night falls can they find rest for themselves, and then, under quiet dark skies, the spirits that live in them are revealed. Recreated from original art by Ram Singh Urveti, Bhajju Shyam and Durga Bai, three of the finest living artists of the Gond tradition, The Night Life of Trees is a tribute to the majesty of trees, and to old ways of relating to the natural world. Each painting is accompanied by its own poetic tale, myth or lore – narrated by the artists themselves recreating the familiarity and awe with which the Gond people view the cosmos.
Necklace: Tree of Life pendant from ccvalenzo on etsy. The shop carries the same tree image on pendants of different shapes and colors. I’m very tempted to pick up a black and white one.
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Ok, so the cicada is not as dainty and pretty as the butterfly, but I think it is a much better symbol of transformation, as it spends years living underground, living off the roots of trees before emerging:
Cicadas live underground as nymphs for most of their lives, at depths ranging from about 30 cm (1 ft) down to 2.5 m (about 8½ ft). The nymphs feed on root juice and have strong front legs for digging.
In the final nymphal instar, they construct an exit tunnel to the surface and emerge. They then molt (shed their skins), on a nearby plant for the last time and emerge as adults. The abandoned skins remain, still clinging to the bark of trees. (src)
