trees

Last week was a nice week. I finally feel truly settled in here, and know I am because Robert and I spent the weekend together driving back roads in our truck, hiking into little lakes, fishing, reading, kayaking, sipping iced tea and simply enjoying being together and being in love. We’re still in love, you know? Really in love. We’ve been married for nine years but I still feel like I’m nineteen and seeing him for the first time, every single day.

Speaking of love, I am head-over-heels-rump-over-tea-kettle crazy for the woods. Stark raving mad. Cuckoo! Berserkers for the forest. I was like this last year, too. If I see a big ponderosa pine tree, I have to hug it, or stop and gaze up at it, dumb in its marvelous presence. I am filled with such deep appreciation. Laying my palms against the trunk of a tree makes me feel close to God. It’s like I’m completing a circuit, there with my feet on earth, my hands on a tree, the tree against the heavens. It’s electric. Sometimes it makes me cry, the very aliveness of it, the smallness and hugeness of it.

Tree jottings from this week past:

When we live here, I am continually dwelling on the idea of trees, the very essence of them, I mean their steadfastness and nature of servitude.

——————————–

Why can’t people be more like trees?

————————————–

The forest is a boisterous place. It’s often described as a bastion of quietude and peace but I should choose to more clearly define it as a place free of human racket. Isn’t a respite from humanity what we are truly seeking when we go out into nature? I write this from the loft deck at the cabin and all around me is bird racket, the various pitches and frequencies of buzzing bugs, a raven shouting at the wind and beating his wings on the thinness of air, the rapid fire rattle of chipmunks and squirrels, the watery sound of the tree tops surfing the breeze. It is loud here. There is sound swirling all around me, tinged and punctuated by the pizzicato of many living things, but I am not made weary by it like I am the sounds of traffic or the spill and shrill of humans in conversation. Here, in the forest, it is anything but quiet.

———————————

This is mid-June. I see and feel the forest cresting, reaching and stretching for the climax of full bloom. The green is still fresh and new, rich with the effort of merit. The trees don’t speak, but I know what they are saying, up there, up high, when they clap their leaves and chime their emotions under moon and sun. I pin a bright badge of respect to the bark of every tree I pass. Oh, good, tall, stalwart friends.

————————————————

Trees for president!

————————

A forest is a fortress, the very thing to hold me safely in.

—————–

I’ll never get over the ways a ponderosa pine tree wraps its bark, branches and needles around the wavering curves of daylight. A pondi is a wrangler of sunshine, a true cowboy of a tree, a tall stout thing that gentles the sky, draws it in, makes it into a brave partner and friend. In the kind and splaying hands of the pondi, the spirit of the sky is never broken. Every needle is a fragrant feather, a remembrance of earth and stone, a glimmer of ground and a tiny defeat of gravity. How I love the ponderosa pine.

I went huckleberry hunting with the girls last night, the forest smelled like some sort of miraculous, freshly baked berry pie, zingy and stain-your-fingers-magenta. Just gorgeous. Our berry picking area was just down a slope from what is believed to be the biggest tree in this forest district so we went to visit that old grandfather and he was a real beauty.

For a tree in the interior West, this is a really huge, ancient ponderosa pine. It took three of us to wrap the trunk in a complete hug. The bark smelled of warmth, sugar honey and caramelized sunshine. I couldn’t help but wonder how many forest fires this tree has survived. How often it has nearly been struck by lightning, or struck at all, over the centuries. I wondered how many birds have built nests in its branches, how many mountain lions have scampered up its trunk, how many people have leaned up against it in a contemplative moment, how many woodpeckers have taken bugs from its trunk, how deep its roots sink into the earth…I wondered a lot about this beautiful grandfather tree. I wondered how many generations of trees it has sired and if they know each other by name and sing a family anthem when the wind blows through their glimmering needles, and let’s take a moment to be honest here, no tree glimmers like a ponderosa pine in the sunshine.

I love ponderosa pine forests. They might be one of my very favorite forests of all. They are peaceful, spacious and kind. The combination of reddish trunks with merry green crowns is chroma-textural and striking. A ponderosa pine forest is a bright place to be. The coastal forests always seem so dark and dripping to me and feel almost oppressive when I am in them — like the dense, black spruce forests of interior Alaska — there’s so much darkness wrapped around the green. But a ponderosa pine canopy does such a magnificent job of filtering light and holding light. The forest floor beneath the trees is always dry, warm, and spicy, especially on hot summer days.

In the summer, when I step under a pondi and simply breathe deep, I feel filled up with sun cinnamon, I speak in waves of light, my heartbeat is refraction.

I’ve been thinking about trees for a couple of weeks now and have come to realize that there’s nothing else on earth that lives a life of service quite like a tree. They spend their entire lives serving the forest they belong to, the dirt between their roots, the air and wind on our planet, the birds in their branches and the animals that populate the ground beneath them. We, as humans, lean up against them when we read our books that are printed on tree flesh, we climb them to get better views or to reach bird nests or to rescue our cats, we sigh with relief when we step inside the shade of their canopies on the hottest days, we nap beneath them, we plant them in thick rows to protect the topsoil of our fields, we cut them down and burn them to keep ourselves warm, we harvest them and build our homes, our cities, our barns out of them, we craft our rocking chairs out of their bodies (canoes, fences, cradles, kitchen tables…), we print our money on the backs of trees, we make maps out of trees so we know where we’re going, we write love letters with trees, we blow our noses with trees, make grocery lists with trees, we pour the life blood of trees on our pancakes and cry out “YUM!” with every forkload of waffle that makes it to our mouth. Our lives are so deeply entwined with trees, in every way, every moment of the day.

Trees live their lives in service to us. And in their death, they serve us still.

Yesterday evening, when I hugged the grandfather ponderosa pine, pressed my nose against his jigsaw bark and breathed deep his sweet summer scent, I felt a flood of gratitude for how hard this tree has worked to stand steady over the centuries, for all the trees he has sired, for the beauty of the mountains around me, for the strength and girth of his tree trunk and for the beauty of the history I could see written across the plates of his skin. And I thanked God for all the trees. All the beautiful trees.

A handful of the random and a dash of trees.

All The Trees