Your own 5 secrets of a particular "plebian in its uses" ancient aspen inspired me to find our mutual friend and sage, John Hay writing on our relationships with trees:
"The less we are able to admit common feelings into our relationship with trees, the more impoverished we become: it must indicate a deforestation of the spirit. Strangely enough, their least understood qualities lie in the sensate natures they share with the rest of life. When I walk through cut over areas where pasture birch, young sugar maples or white pines are growing back, I sense they have a will of their own, an ability to come back that is more than automatic. After all, they are providers. They nurture multiplicity, from root to crown. Just as every life that associates with trees must communicate in one form or another, so trees themselves seem to respond to each other. We have hardly started to explore our mutual chemistry. On a high and open night in the winter, all blazing with the laddered, climbing stars, it is not accidental that the branches of the trees should reach and gestures as they do, or that one's spine should tingle at the lineup of the constellations. We were both constructed to that end."
- John Hay, The Immortal Wilderness, 1987.
And Hay's everlasting benediction (for me) is here:
"It is an unfortunate man or woman who has never loved a tree."
Ah, Ted--"when the wind blows, the leaves speak in tongues, I hear the ocean, the sound of my boyhood . . . the flow of rampant time....Every night I prepare to read in a chair that's no longer there." Wendell Berry once again comes to mind:
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
And from the prologue to Richard Powers' THE OVERSTORY:
"Close your eyes and think of willow. The weeping you see will be wrong. Picture an acacia thorn. Nothing in your thought will be sharp enough. What hovers right above you? What floats over your head right now—now? Trees even farther away join in: All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg's inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There's always as much belowground as above. That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count. A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning. The pine she leans against says: Listen. There's something you need to hear."
I taught literature and love poetry--but you SEE the life around you--you are one of those with that greener mind who has shared with us the meaning you find there. Please don't stop writing--you are one of the rare witnesses who sees below and beyond.
Too late I came to your blog, and much too late I began saving the postings I received. Will you be putting them altogether in a book about your time in Coyote Hollow? Only Kerry Clifford's Cancered Plans has taught me so much while touching my soul and breaking my heart as much as your pieces.
Your own 5 secrets of a particular "plebian in its uses" ancient aspen inspired me to find our mutual friend and sage, John Hay writing on our relationships with trees:
"The less we are able to admit common feelings into our relationship with trees, the more impoverished we become: it must indicate a deforestation of the spirit. Strangely enough, their least understood qualities lie in the sensate natures they share with the rest of life. When I walk through cut over areas where pasture birch, young sugar maples or white pines are growing back, I sense they have a will of their own, an ability to come back that is more than automatic. After all, they are providers. They nurture multiplicity, from root to crown. Just as every life that associates with trees must communicate in one form or another, so trees themselves seem to respond to each other. We have hardly started to explore our mutual chemistry. On a high and open night in the winter, all blazing with the laddered, climbing stars, it is not accidental that the branches of the trees should reach and gestures as they do, or that one's spine should tingle at the lineup of the constellations. We were both constructed to that end."
- John Hay, The Immortal Wilderness, 1987.
And Hay's everlasting benediction (for me) is here:
"It is an unfortunate man or woman who has never loved a tree."
Ah, Ted--"when the wind blows, the leaves speak in tongues, I hear the ocean, the sound of my boyhood . . . the flow of rampant time....Every night I prepare to read in a chair that's no longer there." Wendell Berry once again comes to mind:
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
And from the prologue to Richard Powers' THE OVERSTORY:
"Close your eyes and think of willow. The weeping you see will be wrong. Picture an acacia thorn. Nothing in your thought will be sharp enough. What hovers right above you? What floats over your head right now—now? Trees even farther away join in: All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg's inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There's always as much belowground as above. That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count. A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning. The pine she leans against says: Listen. There's something you need to hear."
I taught literature and love poetry--but you SEE the life around you--you are one of those with that greener mind who has shared with us the meaning you find there. Please don't stop writing--you are one of the rare witnesses who sees below and beyond.
Too late I came to your blog, and much too late I began saving the postings I received. Will you be putting them altogether in a book about your time in Coyote Hollow? Only Kerry Clifford's Cancered Plans has taught me so much while touching my soul and breaking my heart as much as your pieces.