The Day the Trees Disappeared

They were there one day, and the next, they were gone.  A borderland of ancient maples had towered over my backyard view for thirty years, the frame of my world.  They had sheltered me on afternoons when I’d throw a ball to my then little boy, and read in their comforting shade beside my beloved Daschund.  They were my sentries of green as I sat and typed, or drew a pencil through many a piece of writing.

The trees had done more than accompany me.  In many ways, they had defined my life beneath them: secure, present, comforting, and known.

As with any relationship, I’d adapted to the limitations they imposed.  I couldn’t grow tomatoes and I couldn’t plant roses beneath their profuse shade.  But I’d learned the subtler joys of a shade garden, the hostas and ferns and wild ginger they’d enabled me to nurture over the years.

Shade suited me, in fact — my love of privacy and contemplative enclosure.  They were the perfect counterpart to the sanctuary of my desk, my books, and my thoughts in solitude

The day they were gone was like a very bad movie in which real characters and bucolic scenes are hijacked by garish cartoon figures moving across a surreal scrim.  And in that abrupt disruption, their absence became a metaphor for all of the changes that can rip unwonted through the settled rhythms of a life.

What happens when the future that one expected and the present one relied upon, are razed without our consent?  The blazing light of something new arrives, demanding response. We are blinded; we can’t quite see our way into such an altered landscape.  Some days, this feels like exile; others, like powerless “acquiescence.”   For many on this earth in these times, it entails torture, the execution of family members, whole neighborhoods of belonging.

Like the tulips that unfurl at an accelerated pace in the shock of increased sunlight, we run faster, until we collapse, trying to make sense of what is happening to the life we thought we knew.

My neighbors, who felled the trees, view their actions as beneficial.  They want new trees, a new and fuller garden.  These old specimens were standing in their way.  Similarly, there are those in our life excited by the possibilities of the new earth they will be planting with new flowers, and ground covers, a whole new garden in which to roam and gather nourishment.

The day the trees were gone a keening lifted from the earth.  It was as if the Judgment had brushed too close.

The shock, the feeling of violation, slowly abates.  But each time I look at the view, the waves of sadness return.

We don’t always get what we ask for.  And sometimes we are handed what we would never have chosen for ourselves.

In The End of Memory, Miroslav Volf, considered by many one of the leading theologians alive today, describes his arrest and torture during the Bosnian war.  In this book, he chronicles the process whereby he managed to move from the crippling memories of his interrogations and near-fatal beatings at the hands on a Captain G., through the challenges to his identity and Self that this trauma inflicted on him, to asking himself how the very act of remembering these events was confining and limiting his capacity to live in the present, and into a future that held any kind of meaning.

It is a similar question asked by Victor Frankl as he watched the bestial conduct of the Nazi overlords in the death camps to which he lost his wife.  Volf concludes that reconciliation and transformation can only occur when both the victimizer and the victim can be, in a sense, forgotten,in the forge of a contemplative process through which the Self releases limiting constructs, and embraces a faith in the unknown but evolving future into which a new Self will emerge.  It is a letting go and a taking up, in one and the same process – of the past, of old selves, and of the narratives one has lived by, to make room for what, in us, will appear.

Since the trees were felled, a new and different thought has occurred to me.  I cannot bring the trees back.  What has changed can never be un-changed.  But I can absorb the gift of those trees in ways that no act can sever or amputate or undermine.

I loved the trees for qualities that have not vanished — shade, sanctuary, privacy, and rest.  These I loved in my garden, and hold dear in my life.  They need to be established in new ways.    I can grow new structures that embody these values, create new practices by which to sustain me in them.    I can walk in the park near my house every day, communing with the ancient trees there.  I can plant new young trees of my own in their place.  I can find other “tree-bearers” who know what I mean when I talk about the non-negotiable treasure of our secret gardens in which we find much, if not most, of what matters in this life.

In this season, in which our spiritual traditions ask us to remember our forebear’s faith in the unseen, in what could not be certified or counted on in any concrete sense, who refused false gold and false light, and who in the end understood that transformation entails the loss of one form of life in order to grow into a larger life, I am beginning to accept the new view out my window.  Death precedes new life.  But I am learning, too, to seek out what I need from what I carry inside of me, in a new consciousness of what it means to return to one’s roots..

The Chinese have a saying, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.  The second best time is now.”