in the trees

I crave the outdoors, long to be warmed by the sun and to be awed by the depth of trees. When the clock hits leaving time, I find myself running to the earth. And when I map with my irises the curving and crooked paths of branches, allow my bare feet to curl around tumbling roots, welcome the flicker of windy leaves against my outstretched palms, tilt my head in wonder at what stories the trunks’ inner scribbled circles could teach us, I am full of breath. The silky, deepest part of my soul eases to the rhythm of the trees’ lasting.

It is not that I become mindless, that all thoughts and feelings cease their flitting between, through, and within my heart and mind. Rather, it is as if feeling the earth on my skin pulls back the frenzied veil that often masks our truest truths and the whole of humans’ beautiful complexity. In the trees, I am nuanced, and peacefully so.

II.

Today, in the middle of a week in which I have wholly experienced feelings of confusion, of excitement, of frustration, of smiling, of overwhelm, of uncertainty, of commitment, of doubt, of fear, of hopefulness, of growth, of tiredness, of rawness, of exposure, of beauty, I experienced disrespect.

And it annoyed and hurt me and so I complained to present ears and took the first spitting steps on the journey of working myself into a raging stupor, the kind that I sometimes, from behind that veil, convince myself is proof of just how fierce my feminism is. But just before I plunged into that version of my feminism, whose circular anger serves only to hurt my heart, I stepped into the trees, with the  day’s sunlight pulsing around and through me.

And there, in that liminal space between hurt and response, among the trees, I wondered: what if, when unkindness is thrown upon us, we truly turn to the next person and let our own kindness wash upon them? What if our feminism was a living refusal to let the patriarchy take away our kindness? What if we were to courageously maintain a tender heart?

III.

This evening, I walked along the road, gathering wildflowers in my wrapped fingers as I went, and made my way to the winding, hilly paths of the small cemetery just near my home and school. I let curiosity and wonder carry my feet as I drifted between and among the stones, kneeling occasionally to trace names with fingertips or to brush back the grass, uncovering dates when lives first graced and then returned to soil. When I came across the graves of infants or young children, often buried some hundred years previous, beneath now-crumbling stones, I quietly lay a few flowers as I spoke their names into my memory.

I walked up a small hill, seeking another patch of small, white flowers from which to pick, and came across two graves clustered behind a red-leaved bush. On the left, a joined grave: on the back was carved ‘here lie the sons of William’ and on the front were George and Robert’s names, ages four and one when they died. Just to the right of theirs was a single, larger, polished stone with “William” etched into its face, and dates telling some portion of a story of a man who walked the ground some forty years, fifteen of which were lived after he had buried his two sons beneath it.

The bottom of William’s grave, in large capital letters, read, simply: REST.

IV.

Later, after I had wound myself back out of the cemetery and lay in the branches of a tree, literally held up by nature, I told a friend: “It feels like one of those days you could write poems about.”