saying goodbye to our japanese maple....

It is a muggy, damp, almost rainy day in the Berkshires. Before the impeding deluge, I took out an old friend, a once beautiful Japanese maple tree, which had given up the ghost. She had graced our view with splendor for thirteen years - and probably longer for those before us. But last year I noticed only half of the tree budding with spring foliage. This year there was none. We shall replace her as the summer ripens even as the hole created in our garden bears witness to her abiding gifts.

In some ways it feels frivolous to lament this loss: given the magnitude of human suffering,

injustice, grief and anxiety in the USA - especially but not exclusively among brown and black folk - to feel sad about a tree seems cruel. Still, as i peruse saved copies of Maria Popova's fabulous weekly Brain Pickings, I find numerous references to the sacred and healing power of trees. "In the final years of his life, the great neurologist Oliver Sacks reflected on the physiological and psychological healing power of nature, observing that in forty years of medical practice, he had found only two types of non-pharmaceutical therapy helpful to his patients: music and gardens. It was in a garden, too, that Virginia Woolf, bedeviled by lifelong mental illness, found the consciousness-electrifying epiphany that enabled her to make some of humanity’s most transcendent art despite her private suffering." (take a look here for Natasha McElhone's reading of Herman Hesse's 'love letter to Trees,"too. https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/05/04/natascha-mcelhone-wander-hesse-kew/mc_cid=e66586b857&mc_eid=d53a910493 And please don't forget stunning review of Robert MacFarlane's Under Land that begins:

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most beautiful letter. “As a man is, so he sees.” Walt Whitman saw trees as the wisest of teachers; Hermann Hesse as our mightiest consolation for mortality. Wangari Maathai rooted in them a colossal act of resistance that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. Poets have elegized their wisdom, artists have drawn from their form resonance with our human emotions, scientists are only just beginning to uncover their own secret language. Robert Macfarlane — a rare enchanter who entwines the scientific and the poetic in his lyrical explorations of the natural world — offers a crowning curio in the canon of wisdom on human life drawn from trees in a passage from Underland: A Deep Time Journey (public library) — his magnificent soul-guided, science-lit tour of the hidden universe beneath our feet.https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/11/13/robert-macfarlane-underland-tree-love/?mc_cid=e315e9cc24&mc_eid=d53a910

The wise Mary Oliver regularly evoked the salvific gift encountered in the presence of her tree friends: "When I Am Among the Trees."

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

So, too, Wendell Berry: "The Peace of Wild Things." 

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

These trees have taught me the love of God incarnated in the Holy One's first word: creation. I have learned something of the spirituality and rhythm of the seasons. And have found a measure of solace watching, listening, pruning, resting, and caring for these friends who offer their gifts without reservation and stand witness to a grace greater than my anxieties. To be sure, living in their presence is privileged. Not a doubt in the world about this. There is also tender responsibility, too as they invite me to learn, trust, and share their way of being balanced in a culture beyond beauty and proportion.  I spend more time with trees and plants these days than people. That, too is about balance having spent most of my adult days busy with human connections. I need precious little external conversation now. That was true before the corona-lock down - and will continue far beyond it as well. I find that silence fills and nourishes me more than conversation. Paul Goodman put it like this:

Not speaking and speaking are both
human ways of being in the world,
and there are kinds and grades of each.

There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy;
the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face;
the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul,
whence emerge new thoughts;
the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”;
the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity;
the silence of listening to another speak, catching
the drift and helping him be clear;
the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination,
loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it;
baffled silence;
the silence of peaceful accord with other persons
or communion with the cosmos.

Silence - combined with our trees, plants, flowers, grass and sharing each day with one I love

- empowers me to speak a little each week in ways that feel useful. Or, if not useful, at least honest. Silence also gives me more and more clues about the music I want to keep playing and creating. Thomas Merton has been insightful to me: 

If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision... In a world of noise, confusion and conflict, it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom... When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer...

Billy Collins add insight, too, in his poem: "Silence."

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.