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| Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. |
It seems not quite alive, but neither is it fully dead, apparently.
Short and stunted, its hard bare branches spread outward at broken angles like those of trees in the haunted forests of childhood fairy tales. Sepia-toned bark, hard and splintery, peels off in strips in some places; in others, it's solid gray iron.
Inhospitable . . .or so it seems, especially in this season when the air is so icy that simple breathing burns.
And yet . . . .
Home it isn't, but it is a way-station of sorts. Throughout the year, the ravens gather in its branches, as do their smaller, more colorful magpie cousins. At dusk the tree is alive with their chatter, avian shouts and laughter and eventually lullabies.
It stands above a coyote crossing, and the birds use it as an outpost, keeping watch over their own, and occasionally, over others, too. Even when camouflaged deep in its recesses, in the crotches and notches where the branches first emerge from the trunk, their voices carry loud on the winter air when they feel the need to raise the alarm.
It's a perch, a blind, a hunter's lair for the raptors, the red-tails and harriers and Cooper's hawks who come to visit in ones and twos.
It's a threshold, a boundary, a wayfarer's landmark; a stile, an outpost, a line of demarcation.
It's a marker of interstices, itself an interstice, hovering in a state of being between that which lives and that which does not; trunk on one side of an artificial line, roots and branches transgressing the space freely and openly; a host but not a home to those who travel through and above and beneath it.
It's probably why it feels like home to me.
Fencing is an artificial boundary, all right. So are roads. I prefer the natural ones: the creek, the pond, the Circle, the plants that place themselves as they will instead of according to artificial plans. The descendants of important trees reaching out across artificial bounds such as the driveway to send their child across the way to thrive. With luck this one's mate will come the same way, as a volunteer, but if not, we'll provide for the offspring the same way his/her parents were provided each other. There are other examples but no room here.
ReplyDeleteI wind up treasuring the native volunteers who come here of their own, possibly by bird, possibly by local parentage, possibly by wind, and would disrupt a neat landscape diagram if I were so foolish as to have one. There are places here that feel like opportunities to approach majesty. It takes me away from the everyday pressures and places me into ITS time, the time of the old-growth tree, seeing decades as seconds and vice versa. It is time out of mind.
That too is not "ours" due to another white man' boundary that says that the old growth tree "belongs" to someone else. (Howinheck can any person say they "own" a tree?) That last is something we need to try to change, because this venerable master deserves protection by those specifically aware of him.
I give thanks to Spirit and the Gods we honor most that we are permitted to serve as stewards for this land. I consult the Guardians when uncertain about something involving the land, and they respond. They are their own people, not mine and not my neighbors. We can try our best to understand them and what they need when. What else should we do that we aren't (mostly me), Nimisenh? Communication with the land and its inhabitants is so much a part of our lives here, for me it's become instinctive to check in. Now I need some ways to honor them that nurture all that they are, and all their connections to the land. Pagans have some nonappropriative ways as well as ways that clearly have been stolen. I lean toward annointing a reachable part of each tree with a Blessing oil made by a dear online friend.
Ack, I drag on, far too much. Apologies, Nimisenh, for wearing out your ears, eyes and mind on someone who, in so many ways, doesn't "get it". What should be instinctive to me isn't; I wonder how much was childhood suppression by being told, over and over, that "it wasn't real" and that "you just have too overactive an imagination", how much is because I chose to suppress these senses for the most part in order to fit in (though not fully, never fully) and how much I've been trying and often failing to reclaim in the last couple of decades. And I keep feeling that you're the best person to check in with besides the trees, because you won't fill my mind with new age hooey but you DO understand.
Much love, dearest sister, and health to the tree you love.