a tree's soft rescue.
Recently, I was standing alone outside the entrance to an emergency room where I’d just dropped off my partner. His blood levels needing measuring and monitoring, and we needed to know he wasn’t still losing any internally. He’d already spent one night here, but tonight - the night after Thanksgiving - the ER was hopping in this small coastal southern town. We arrived after 10pm, the wait was 3-4 hours. My kids were still awake and worried back at the condo where we were staying, so I had to whisper to the desk workers, “please keep an eye on him, in case he passes out.” I won’t go into the details of his particular story, but for me, standing in the dark, halfway between my life partner and my kids - I felt as if I were skimming the surface of a wide, dark body of water, unsettled by the waves of emotion that needed to stay under the surface in order to keep us all from drifting apart. Slowly, Pema Chodron’s words floated to the surface, “groundlessness isn’t something we need to avoid.” I almost laughed out loud, here in this unfamiliar place, among people I couldn’t emotionally or logistically lean on for support, I was truly inside the meaning of complete groundlessness. It was unavoidable.
Out in the dark humid night, I slowly willed my legs to traverse this groundless moment. Instead of walking straight to my car, my legs led me to the base of a massive ancient oak. This tree somehow survived the hospital’s erection and now stood wedged between the glaring florescent lights of the waiting room and the dark rows of cars where remnants of worry, pain, and the sounds of crying babies lingered. I lifted my palms to the rough, moss encased bark. Though I could sense the vast tangle of stories this tree knew – around since at least the early 1700s, when this marshy edge became a town- mostly I felt the endless flow of it’s great capacity for life. Like a heartbeat, it pulsed under my hands. I leaned in, forehead to tree, and found myself asking this great old being for a bit of strength to get me through the night, and to watch over my love while I was away.
Much later, with both kids on either side of me finally breathing deep, I landed in a light dream. I was all moss, dry in some parts and drinking mist in others. At first I tried to pick it off – it was a bit itchy – until I looked up to find a little finch on my shoulder. I realized the thick moss there was protecting me from its sharp little feet, giving us a soft buffer to appreciate each other. The finch sang a morning song that let me know I was not alone - then another that made the moss grow.
I made it through that night and the rest of the trip with the image of moss coating my skin. It helped me carry the luggage and push the wheelchair around the airport and drive my family back to our nest in the north woods. Here the oaks are tall where the southern ones are wide. They are soft and big leafed where the ancient marsh dwellers are prickly and round. Both versions seem set on resilience no matter what the weather brings - on that clear directive we call, simply, to live.
Everywhere we go, trees are more present, more aware, and more responsive to our mutterings than I think most of us cultured in western thought can even comprehend. They shelter, inspire, nourish, and regulate us, whether we know it or not. They breathe with us, literally, and even seem to be able to reach through dreams. They are our true cathedrals, known deep and wide throughout indigenous cultures. As Malidoma Somé writes, “When there is a grief ritual in my village, it takes place in the open air, among the trees, because that is the sort of thing the trees will echo and the earth will absorb most easily.” As my own Baltic ancestors knew, like most land-based cultures know, trees shape the words that fall from our mouths, from plea to prayer.
Upon making it home, waking in the early slanting light of this particular longitude, I stepped out to greet the red oak giants I live beneath. I told them my story, my dream, the whole painful ordeal. Then I gathered a branch that had come down in the wind while I was away, and placed it on the outside altar, next to a bit of mossy bark from a coastal live oak. These beings are also honored on the ancestor altar, alongside all the brilliant, bumbling humans I claim no matter their faults. The trees though, they receive my deepest bow. They hold the fabric of our grief and praise together in their simple, continuous chant: life. life. life.