Fall

The Great Apple Migration

November 3, 2018 In Climbing Company Fall Landscape Prayer Flags Tree 1 Comment

Three times over the past few weeks I look out a window or door and see a squirrel bounding across the driveway with an apple in its mouth. Bright gold in the sunshine, a fleshy ball of carbohydrates and seeds, a dozen more trees in ovo, and its transport vehicle: a gray-furred bundle of muscle and bone. The route goes from the immense apple tree on one side of the driveway to the woods on the other. A few years ago I found a tooth-marked apple in a crotch of my tree, and another year looked from my perch through the gray woods of late fall and saw a single perfect red apple in the crotch of another tree, about forty feet off the ground. Squirrel pantries.

Hundreds of apples hang from the source tree, fall by the dozens, lie gleaming in the grass among fallen leaves, and then vanish. Their primary means of escape is by deer-belly, three or four of whom (deer, not bellies) watch me, alert and unafraid, as I leave the house in the morning or return at twilight. There has been a bear in the area for weeks, maybe taking part in the feast as well, though I haven’t seen it. Squirrels carry off what’s left.

I think about these things at this time every year. Countless thousands of leaves, having collected energy from the sun all summer and converted it to carbohydrates, now build up in drifts on the ground, their work done, cellular structures breaking down, returning minerals to the soil, yielding energy to insects and worms. The great energy exchange web flung wide over meadow and woods, substances changing form, growth converting to death and then to new life. It happens year round, but it’s palpable in fall, when so many lifeforms in the plant kingdom expire or shed seasonally, and what they become or lose is taken up by animal lifeforms, energy and nutrients extracted, and then shed in turn for the next cycle of plants to grow from.

Emme and I climb the tree to hang the prayer flags she brought from Bhutan. As we untie and unfurl the tightly wrapped roll, a small cloud of dust puffs out, hangs suspended for a moment in the sunlight, then drifts down towards the forest floor. Bhutanese dust settling into the Vermont soil. Its own energy exchange, of sorts? I think of airplane fuel, looms, money, the economies—large and small—that generated it, and currency exchange; of the farmers that grew the cotton, the animals that fertilized the fields, and the electricity powering the Thimpu shop; of the bag of souvenirs slung over the shoulder and of the breakfast-fuel of tree climbers; and of the sunlight that fed a field of cotton in Bhutan and now shines slantwise through colored panes of it in a tree in Vermont.

Which I guess kind of makes Emme a squirrel, and the prayer flags an apple of sorts. And the exchange a complicated mix of energy, money, culture, and spirit, rather than carbohydrates.

When the prayer flags are hung—spiritual seeds planted in the new earth of this small piece of sky—we climb down and return to the house.

Scythe!

October 21, 2018 In Fall Taoism Tree No Comment

I have fallen in love—with a gently curved length of ashwood and a wicked 65 cm long steel blade.

I’ve been intending to buy a scythe for several years now and finally got around to doing so. It’s technically a Christmas present from three years ago. After some searching around, I order it from ScytheWorks in British Columbia. It’s a European-style scythe, quite different from the Anglo-American tool that can be found in old barns and antique shops around New England. The snath is less curved and the handles more offset, and the blade is thinner, lighter, and made of tensioned steel.

In this case, an Italian-made Falci blade. For any scythe enthusiasts out there (this is for you, Jeff!) it is the #128C blade pictured here. ScytheWorks snaths (the handle of the scythe) are made by a family-owned Mennonite wheelwright shop in Ontario.

It gives me great pleasure that my great-grandfather’s (American) scythe is still in the family, still cared for and used, if not by myself. In purchasing a scythe of my own I go the old-country route (so that I’m using the kind of scythe my Austrian immigrant great-grandfather would have used if he had stayed in Europe, while he spent his life using the kind of American scythe I choose not to buy now; there seems a kind of gentle irony in this). The debate rages fiercely as to the respective merits of each, although I think these days the consensus seems to be swinging toward the European scythe. For any who wish to investigate this discussion to an extraordinary degree of detail (to me fascinating, to some perhaps excruciating), check out the commentary by Peter Vido of the Scythe Connection on a pro-European-scythe article by Botan Anderson of One Scythe Revolution, and the pro-American-scythe response to it by Benjamin Bouchard. Vido takes both their positions to pieces and in the process writes the most precise and illuminating piece on scythes I’ve come across.

My scythe comes pre-sharpened, which for a European scythe means peened and honed and ready for use (the American scythe has a thicker, heavier blade that is sharpened with a grinding wheel). Once I’ve assembled it, and my neophyte brain has absorbed a handful of YouTube videos on scything technique, I take it out to the meadow.

It is the most beautiful tool, perfectly designed for its purpose. It’s simple, the movements are economical, and the experience of working one’s way through a stand of waist-high weeds and grasses in the meadow is a profoundly pleasurable experience, engrossing and meditative (as well as an excellent core workout). I now understand why there’s a scythe revolution, why it is returning to use on small farms and homesteads around the world, from America and England to central and Southern Europe to India and Nepal (where it is being introduced as a more efficient alternative to the traditional sickle for harvesting grain—and as I write this, I remember that when Emme visited a farm in Bhutan, the farmer demonstrated cutting grain with a sickle; she doesn’t remember ever seeing a scythe).

Now I understand why there are so many YouTube videos about the beauty and potential of scything:

And others pitting scythes against weed whackers:

And this documentary video, fascinating even if one doesn’t understand a word of the German, about contemporary scything on precariously steep slopes in the Swiss alps, where scythes have never gone out of fashion. (Check out how they get the hay off the mountain at 9:45 and following: it is unexpected and very, very cool.)

I am a rank beginner. It will take time to improve my technique. Even so, scything comes naturally. But now I have a new skill to learn. The hardest thing about using a scythe is not scything, it’s keeping the damned thing sharp. The European scythe is honed in the field, every 5 or 10 minutes, with a stone kept wet in a sheath clipped to one’s belt. And over the course of four or five hours, after repeated sharpening, the bevel on the cutting edge becomes steeper and then the blade has to be peened, or hammered out on an anvil (with the help of a peening jig, if one is, like me, new to the task). That is, the blade has to be cold-hammered to drive more material toward the edge, which then can be re-sharpened by honing with a whetstone. As it’s late fall, and growth in the meadow is tough and fibrous, the beautiful edge with which the blade came is already long gone. My next task is to learn to work with this metal. I have the winter for it.

What connection with the tree, you might ask? Many! Scythe and tree alike lead one to reflections on technology and the use of the hands—on the importance of incorporating some work of the hands into one’s life. Not of course to replace digital, electrical or mechanical technologies with manual technologies; but to retain some of that knowledge, some engagement with the world through our hands and feet. (See the beautiful recent book Craeft by Alexander Langlands, which starts with a chapter on traditional haying techniques: “While [the scythe] may never reach the same elevated status it had in the medieval period, it’s experiencing a renaissance in the west, with many people undergoing the same epiphanic journey as I did on that late April morning.”)

This, for me, is part of the beauty of a daily climbing practice. As I wrote a year or so ago: hands on bark, face to the sun. No, I won’t be cutting our entire meadow with a scythe, or mowing our extensive lawn with it; but there is no better way to clear growth from around the apple trees, or along the edge of the driveway. Or be out in the meadow on a summer morning, scything for the pure joy of it.

But also, the movements of scything have been explicitly compared to those of Tai Chi and other eastern martial arts—and I have talked about climbing the tree in the same terms, about the way that rising up among the branches is like the practice of a kind of vertical Tai Chi.

In a more specifically martial context, it is interesting to note that in Medieval Europe combat techniques were developed for the scythe, as well as other tools farmers might have at hand (check out this illuminated manuscript). As there is an enthusiast for every obscure practice in this marvelous age of YouTube, a reconstruction of these techniques can also be seen. (Certain to be useful if I’m surprised in the field by a rabid, scythe-wielding black bear.)

And to return to the agricultural-spiritual, a kung fu-inspired form has been created for the scythe as well (as far as I can tell, by the aforementioned Peter Vido and his family; the rest of the video is worth watching as well). Maybe something else to work on next summer. (If I’m found in my meadow cut to ribbons, well, at least I’ll have died happy!)

So everything connects to everything else in the end, and in the beginning too. And the tree, like everything else, is a window onto each other thing. And so, climbing every day, I climb through window after window after window through the marvelous interconnected multiplicity of it all. Everything converging like—well, like branches on a tree.

Now if I can just figure out how to sharpen that blade.

Mountains

October 14, 2018 In Climbing Fall Landscape Taoism Tree Weather No Comment

It was a good year for mountains. The girls and I bookended the summer with two: Mt. Abraham soon after school got out, just before they embarked on their respective summer adventures, and Camel’s Hump in late August when it was all winding down. Camel’s Hump is my favorite mountain in Vermont, and it was fantastic to get up there with the girls, to stand windswept at the southern drop-off and watch cloud shadows crawl like lumbering slow creatures across the landscape below. And then sit on the ledges and take silly pictures of each other.

I love the the intimacy of mountains as much as the vastness. The one nested within the other; and not always the intimacy within the vastness, though more often that. Of the pictures I took that day it was not one of stone, wind, and distances that rose to the top.

Though stone, wind and distances are pretty great too.

On the Saturday of Columbus Day weekend I head for the White Mountains. A friend and I are hiking the Franconia Ridge loop trail, my favorite hike in New England. I am assured by mountain-forecast.com that it will be sunny, if windy and cool. The drive over is promising. Brilliant early-morning sunlight ignites foliage from the side, setting hillsides and cliffs on fire. But halfway up Little Haystack a steely cloud cover settles in, and several hundred yards from the top we climb into a heavy, roiling mist. We pull on every layer we have and stop for food on top of the mountain, then set off across the ridgeline towards Lincoln and Lafayette. This ridgeline, nearly two miles long and encompassing three mountain tops, is magnificent. The views are extraordinary. The ground falls away sharply into deep valleys on either side of the trail, with Cannon Mountain off to the west and the Pemigewasset Wilderness to the east. Alpine plants a few inches high carpet the earth among the rocks. Ahead the trail drops and rises, drops and rises, over multiple peaks.

None of this can be seen today. Massive walls of mist are blowing over the ridge at thirty miles an hour. Huge tendrils of it snake up ravines and curl over the trail. Figures disappear into the mist ahead of us or appear as though from nowhere moving toward us. It’s cold, and many of those traversing the ridgeline have gloves and winter hats along with hiking poles. The only colors are the tannins of alpine plants, the cyan green of lichens, the dark gray of the rocks and the whitish-gray mist.

It is spectacular! It is in fact far more beautiful than the last time I was on the ridge–a stunning, blue-skied sunny day around this same time of year that showed the foliage and the mountains to grand effect—but with nothing like this sense of raw power and mystery. Occasionally the wind blows a peak clear of mist, and we can see down into a valley. As we watch, new masses of cloud gather at the bottom of the slopes, as though waiting for the right moment to strike, and then hurtle up toward us on the ridge. The effect–the day–is utterly exhilarating.

Watching these formations of mist and the mountains emerging and disappearing again, I think of the book Existence: A Story, by David Hinton, the translator of classical Chinese poetry and Taoist texts, whose Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape is one of my favorite books about mountains.

Existence is a meditation on the portrayal of mist-clad mountains in classical Chinese brush paintings, and the related art of “landscape practice”—a phrase that is resonant for me in my own climbing of the tree, which I have always thought of in those terms without having quite the right words for it. Chinese artist-intellectuals “dreamed mountains, and built their creative lives around them,” Hinton writes. They “saw in the wild forms of mountain landscape the very workings of the Cosmos.”

Mountain landscape is where “existence itself is most dramatically present as a cosmology of elemental forces, where the intermingling of heaven and earth is most immediately visible. In mountains, one can see earth rising up into heaven, and heaven seething down into earth in the form of dramatic sunlight and mist and stormy skies.”

The rich creative potency of Absence manifests in mist and air and darkness; Presence appears as the “rivers-and-mountains landscape emerging from that emptiness of mist and cloud, water and sky.” In the painting which is the meditative touchstone for the book, “this is true of the mountain ridgelines suffused in mist, the valleys wholly lost to mist, Inkstone-wanderer and his attendant, and even the summit rock where they stand.”

I am Inkstone-wanderer, at least for today, as I watch mist curl up the slopes of Mt. Lincoln, valleys lost to clouds below, Lafayette vanishing and reappearing along the ridgeline ahead of me.

And this inner play of Presence and Absence, writes Hinton, of stone and mist, the visible and the invisible, tells the story of the churning existence-tissue, of the unending moment-by-moment birth of existence. Immersion in and contemplation of this is landscape practice.

The tree offers its own form of landscape practice. Landscape practice on an intimate and daily scale, for those of us who cannot live on a remote mountainside. Known in the dark, or in twilight, it offers its own version of Presence and Absence, of what is and what is not. Climbed in mist or rain, it appears or disappears. It exudes membranous leaves and sheds them again; fills with golden light, catches days and months and years in its arms; opens itself up to stars and the Milky Way. I leave the ground and climb up into a region of the between, where Heaven and Earth meet and and their interplay is the existence-tissue and I am swinging through it.

Halfway across the ridgeline we shelter from the wind for a few moments at the Gargoyle rock formations near the peak of Mt. Lincoln. The scale of perception in this quiet alcove of stone abruptly shifts from the vast and the windswept to the intimate; from the macro to the micro. A small gem of brilliant color presents itself, a still center in this world of churning elemental power.

Mephitis mephitis nigra

October 5, 2018 In Climbing Evening Fall Miscellanea No Comment

It is late and I step out into the night and head for the tree. I move across the darkness of the lawn, navigating mostly by the slope of the ground, and then freeze about twenty feet from where I guess the bottom of the ladder to be. I have walked into a wall no less impenetrable for not being solid. The air is dense with the overpowering reek of skunk. “The rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril,” I believe Shakespeare wrote somewhere, about something; and that doesn’t even come close. I take a few steps forward and the stench seems to increase exponentially. This is fresh; and ground zero is somewhere nearby. I remember the burnt-rubber chemical-weapon smell left on the dogs when a skunk hit them at close range a year ago, and hesitate. Can a skunk spray twice in quick succession? If it’s lurking just inside the darkness of the woods, still irritable at whatever disturbed or attacked it, is it spent, or ready for another round? It doesn’t seem like the time for theoretical inquiry. I turn and book it back to the house.

A notable day, then. In nearly three and a half years of climbing the tree, with the sole exception of three days when I forgot, and climbed it 25 times the following days, I have never missed a day (unless of course we were out of town). That is, nothing has ever prevented me from climbing the tree. Not a fever, or a broken toe, or a busy day, or a tree sheeted in ice. Not getting home from a trip at 2 am, nor leaving for one at 4 am. Nothing has stopped me from climbing. Until now.

At the porch I stop and bow to the darkness and the formidable power of the Mephitis mephitis nigra; then turn and enter the brilliance of the house.

Cloth to the Wind, Frost to Snow

December 10, 2017 In Fall Photography Prayer Flags Snow Weather No Comment

Several weeks ago:

After days of wind the upper prayer flags are gone. A short length of braided cotton tied around a slender branch is all that remains. The prayer flags themselves have flown, and, as usual, I can’t sight them anywhere in neighboring trees. It would seem inevitable that once torn from their place they would be caught up somewhere in the woods around, which amount to a giant net of twigs and branches, but they never are. Do they blow straight up, and then out, over the tops of the trees? Hard to imagine.

The lower flags have also come unmoored, but as is usual for them they are strung up in the branches just below where they hung. They make a kind of twisted fabric sculpture in the air—though nowhere near as beautiful and intricate a sail-like formation as the one that formed among these branches two years ago (see photographs in the Cloth image gallery). They change shape, by slow degrees, day by day over the next week or so. There is little sunlight these days, so I’m not able to get especially beautiful photographs, but it adds interest to the daily climb to watch their configuration alter.

Earlier this week I am out early, hauling a bag or two of trash to the end of our driveway. As I turn back up the slope of the driveway I am walking toward the rising sun, and the meadow ignites in a white fire. The grasses and milkweed are thronging with fine crystals, each one minutely refracting the sun’s light. Each filament of milkweed fluff is rimed with filaments of frozen water; light compounding light. Apple trees and rocks are all frosted, though not as densely as last year in Rockfrost and Subzero: A Rose-Frosted World. I run back to the house for the camera before the sun has its way with all that delicate ice. The tree, with its higher elevation, is alas frost-free, but I start by climbing it, ritually; then on to the ephemeral frost.

And this morning, the world is as new as though just cast on the potter’s wheel, pulled from the forge this moment, paint still drying on the watercolor paper. Four inches of snow have fallen overnight and cling to everything, perched improbably on twigs and stems. December finally feels like December in Vermont.

I am in the tree with the camera when the early morning air first stirs, and clumps of snow rain down around me, shattering to powder on branches, shoulders, arms.

Ardor

November 29, 2017 In Climbing Fall Night No Comment

I go out of the house into the black citadel of night. There is a sliver of moon, a dense crusting of stars, and it is very cold, about fifteen degrees. My eyes have not yet adjusted and it is difficult to find the few stone steps from the driveway up onto the lawn. But ten or fifteen steps later I start to make out a faint wash of light over the land.

I’ve climbed often by the barest glimmer of light that comes from stars alone, and many times by a full moon in a sky brimming with a dark brilliance that banishes all stars. Tonight the moon is so slender a crescent that the light around me feels like an even balance of stars and moon. One pale fire, spread evenly across the landscape; some of it from so near, and some from so far.

It is the coldest night yet this year, an early visitation of winter, and as I cross the lawn I think of Donne’s poem, ‘A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day,’ and especially the line, ‘The world’s whole sap is sunk.’ That is winter exactly: everything is stripped bare, everything has receded. The air is emptied of moisture, leaves are gone from trees, herbaceous vegetation has collapsed and withered. All life withdrawn to root and seed. All warmth, far down in the earth. The frost, chasing it down.

What is left: bare branches, darkness, cold, the stars. I am striding through a resistant world, not unfriendly exactly, but not welcoming either. There is a sense of contesting.

And as I approach the tree, without context or obvious origin I find myself thinking the word ‘ardor.’ I climb the ladder, step into the lower branches, and start my ascent: passion, fervor, intensity. I can feel the cold of the branches through my thin gloves as I move upwards alongside the trunk. ‘Ardor,’ from the Anglo-Norman ardour, from the Latin ardere, to burn. I climb, burning with the exhilaration of the cold and the night, lending it fire.

I wonder about the relation between ‘ardor’ and ‘arduous,’ but when I check later I find no common origin. ‘Arduous,’ from the Latin arduus, difficult. From its root meaning: lofty, high, steep, hard to reach. Like the top of a tree.

But the way they chime morphologically and semantically is irresistible: the one very nearly defined by the need for the other. The arduous is what requires effort, ardor, to achieve. Ardor is the passion required to achieve the difficult. The fire required to meet the cold. The sap to be supplied when the world’s whole sap is sunk.

We’re not there yet, St. Lucy’s Day, December 14th. Observed especially in Scandinavian countries, it celebrates a girl bringing light (ardor) into darkness (the arduous), and originally coincided with the winter solstice, the shortest day, falling on December 21st. Or, as Donne puts it, ‘the year’s midnight, and the day’s.’ We are all close to the year’s midnight, here on the brink of December; and I in the tree, now, am close to the day’s.

But at the top of the tree, irregular black branches crossing and recrossing against the stars around, I understand that it is not just that what is arduous requires ardor to achieve it. It is also that there is a kind of ardor in the arduous. There is a kind of light in the darkness. An exhilaration in being at the top of a tree on a frosty winter night; the bracing clarity that ignites a kind of spiritual passion.

The joy of contesting.

Still, we always welcome the girl with the wreath of candles.

My Tree, My Church: A Proleptic Sketch

November 12, 2017 In Climbing Fall Rumination Taoism Tree No Comment

On a recent Sunday morning I climb the tree, glorious and full of light. The glory and the light are the tree’s, of course—but it lends them me, briefly. Sometimes when I climb on Sundays, especially if it’s morning, I find myself thinking of all the virtuous souls out there heading off to church; and, for me, of being in the tree as a kind of going to church.

It was as a spiritual practice that I first conceived of climbing the tree two and a half years ago, though it has become many things since then. Herewith, a few brief, preliminary note-like observations on the spiritual dimensions of being in the tree.

There is no better place from which to celebrate the glory of creation than the top of a tree. The world sings and you sing with it. The sacred dimension of life, even for those who feel there is one, can prove elusive. God, the more so. Which is not to say that these things burst forth reliably at the top of a tree either, but there are times and places when we feel them more closely; this is presumably why some go to church, and it’s part of the reason I climb the tree.

Last spring the community chorus that Claire and I are in sang Cindy Kallet’s “I’m Gonna Walk”:

“I’m gonna walk to the glory of the river, I’m gonna walk to the glory of the stars;

I’m gonna run to the glory of the mountain, I’m gonna run to the glory of the sky;

I’m gonna fly to the glory of the wind, I’m gonna fly to the glory of the rain.”

This speaks to so much of my experience in the tree. The glory of the stars, the mountain, the sky; and on more than one stormy day, the wind and the rain. And glory is more than beauty; glory is celebration and gratitude and praise; it is the self giving way for a few moments before the majesty of creation.

Or again, climbing is sitting. The practice of the mind of no mind. I think of videos I have seen of Buddhist monks engaged in walking meditation. The slow transverse of a sandy path in front of a monastery, back and forth, almost infinitesimally slowly. Just walking; just sitting; just climbing.

The body moves from branch to branch with the mind focused, empty. Some can do this seated on a meditation cushion; for me it helps to be in motion, to observe the flow of the body rather than the flow of breath. Still there are times when, standing at the top of the tree, prayer flags strung against the sky, I lean back against the trunk, a cushion of sorts, watch my breath, and meditate for a while.

Even more, I think of Taoism, of the stillness in movement that is tai chi. Climbing the tree is a kind of vertical tai chi. Taoists speak of wu wei, of “not doing,” or “effortless being.” My body knows how to climb the tree now; there is no effort, no calculation, no resistance. I step into the branches and there is movement upwards, nearly of its own accord. Have I climbed the tree a thousand times? Probably not quite; but close. And now climbing up is like water flowing down; it is just what happens.

I think also of the importance of nature in Taoism. The contemplation of change, of beauty, of the ephemerality of the world. Leaves falling, snow piling up, buds bursting. The nesting and overlapping cycles of time: the hourly change of light, temperature, weather; the revolution of night and day; the moon that comes and goes as climbing companion; the turning of seasons, of years.

The Taoist sages, for all their love of valleys and low places, built their huts in the mountains; I, my hut of hours in my tree. From there I see they have a point: all being is becoming; all becoming is ying and yang; climbing itself is the physical exchange of push and pull; and every season contains its opposite as its seed.

Or again: the tree is for me the church of art, the temple of creation. Of photography, of writing. And thus the tree proliferates like—well, like the leaves on a tree. There are thousands of it. And every one different. How better to enter the abundance of creation than as active participant in it? This is the abundance of being, that it can refract and multiply through image, through thought, through experience. We critters with consciousness—we are the great amplifiers of existence; through us, being abounds.

And too there is the wildness of being in the tree. This is its own kind of church; the church of the ancient, of the primal; the church of adrenaline. Its own kind of hunger, its own kind of savagery, however comparatively mild. The pitting of sinews against icy limbs.

Or again, the tree as practice of openness. No presuppositions, no goal. No religion, no spiritual framework. Just climbing in full openness to what may come. To what flake of lichen or trickle of memory; to what cascade of thoughts; to what sorrow or joy or indigo bunting (just once) might fly your way. The presupposition of all worship, all spirituality: openness and and a wide-hearted sense of wonder.

Most writers don’t write to get something particular down. They write to find out what they have. This is also why one climbs. To climb a tree is to ask a question, and to be open to the answer.

Simone Weil says that attention is the highest form of prayer. Deep climbing is attending. Deep climbing is climbing in which one goes up to go down, to strike a taproot down in search of what matters.

But, Whoa, you say! It can’t always be like that to climb a tree!

And you would be right.

It’s certainly not like that in the grim cold unendingly gray days of March and April—Vermont’s dark night of the soul—and it’s not always, or even often, like that on summer afternoons, luminous fall mornings, or full-moon-drenched winter nights. But it is what climbing the tree can mean, can be, and sometimes is. And when it’s not—well, that’s the whole point of practice. That’s why we go to church on days we don’t want to, continue to meditate when uninspired, pick up our violin again, lace up our running shoes anyways, set pen to paper once more.

‘Proleptic’ can mean anticipatory: these notes in that sense are preliminary, tentative, a gesture towards talking about climbing the tree as spiritual practice. But the word has a more profound sense. Prolepsis is to take as complete or existing something which is not, or is not yet. To my mind (and it would take a lot of unpacking to think this through—this is a very proleptic gesture toward the religious implications of prolepsis), the very essence of the religious, of the spiritual, is proleptic. It is to take what is hinted at or suggested as achieved or accomplished. It is to climb a tree as though it meant all the things one wanted it to; and lo! It turns out to mean those things. It is to sit in meditation, trying hard not to try hard, recognizing that Enlightenment is simply to see how things were all along. It is to take as real a God of whom one has only intimations, through text or tradition or experience; and to live accordingly. And more, I think we do this in every moment of every day, infusing the world with meaning and hope.

Prolepsis is to live towards, rather than from; and how else would one really want to live? Prolepsis is the ongoing ingredience of the possible in the real.

At its best, climbing a tree is consolation, and refuge from sorrow. It is community, when others are up there with you; it is adrenaline, when the world has turned slippery with rain. It is stillness, in moments of flow, and beauty, nearly always. It is praise and celebration of the glory of the world; and it is a way of furthering that glory.

At its best, climbing a tree is an act of love.

These days may be few, but we live for them.

Emptying of Leaves, Filling Up With Light

October 29, 2017 In Fall Landscape Photography No Comment

Every year I am surprised all over again by the transition from the enclosed intimacy of a tree mantled in foliage to a nest of branches exuberantly open to wind, landscape, sky and light. It is impossible not to luxuriate in the warmth and abundance of summer, but climbing comes newly alive for me every fall. Herewith a series of photographs of the tree emptying of leaves and filling up with light.

Leaves for Stars

October 5, 2017 In Climbing Company Fall Landscape Night No Comment

One night I climb the tree late. I am just home from chorus rehearsal in Bridgewater. It is a clear night with just the memory of light clinging to the horizon: a dark blue line fading quickly into the black of the sky above. There are stars everywhere. As I cross the lawn and approach the tree I look up at its canopy and see that the tree has changed. What was once an impenetrable black silhouette against the stars is now riddled with them. Enough leaves have fallen during the day that the tree is now like an aura in the night, a spiritual body that can be looked through to the starry sky behind. In losing it has gained; it has traded leaves for stars.

From inside the tree the change is even more apparent: what was once a secret enclosure has opened out. I am in the tree, in the night, in the sky.

When I next climb by day (and it may have been days later—in summer and fall I often wait until twilight or darkness to climb, for the sheer pleasure of it) I see that not only have leaves begun falling, but those left on the tree have curled and shriveled, reducing their profile. After weeks of temperatures in the 80s and higher, what is left is a kind of crumpled brownish-green filigree against the sky.

Emme has been spending more time in the tree even than me in recent days, and both she and Claire have come into the tree with me at night. They are remarkably comfortable climbing high in the dark. All week the moon has been growing brighter, and with the tree more open now its top fills with a whitish light. The fields and wooded hillsides are burnished silver. The temperatures have finally dropped, and beautiful sunny days in the 60s resolve into nights that are clear and cold.

A brilliant moon on a cold night sets one thrumming to ancient reverberations—all the more so when you are up in the treetops. It awakens a hunger and an exhilaration that are hard to describe. One is lonely and replete at the same time.

We climb frequently and wait for the full moon.

It comes on Thursday. Late in the evening we turn out the lights in the house and go out into the night. We cross the silver lawn to the darkness of the woods. We enter the tree and climb up towards the light. The moon is low so even the top of the tree is dark, but the hills and meadow all around are bathed in a pale silver-green light. There are few stars in the coldly luminous sky. All things that are dark glow. We spend a while clustered near the upper prayer flags, then descend, a sequence of shadowy figures dropping down through shadowy branches.

Rockfrost

December 21, 2016 In Fall Landscape Photography Weather No Comment

[View with images] A week ago Sunday, when the sun rose a little higher, the rose color of sunrise faded and was replaced by the purest white. Frost burned like tiny arctic flames from every feature of the landscape. I went back out to take more pictures. I climbed the tree again and photographed ice crystals clinging to branches, now backlit by the sun.

Seeing that the orchard is even more heavily frosted, I move on to photograph rock stacks in the meadow, along with a few stones I have placed in the apple trees. (Woodwaterstone taking on new meaning in this case, crystalized water pulling me from wood to stone.)

I like to imagine these countess miniature pinnacles of ice erecting themselves over night, molecule by frozen molecule. How does Coleridge put it? “The frost performs its secret ministry / Unhelped by any wind.” Cold condensing moisture from the air, transfiguring it into crystals; erecting crystals into towers. Water now pointing outwards like millions of tiny porcupine quills. As purely white as freshly covered alpine slopes.

I take some photographs of apples still hanging in the orchard, and I can’t resist including them, even though they are neither maple tree nor rock sculpture.

I spend some time reading about frost and its formation, about the differences between advection frost and radiation frost (often known as hoar frost). What I’m seeing is clearly radiation frost, formed from air moisture on cold, clear, still nights, when heat radiates from objects into the unobstructed atmosphere quickly enough that water goes from gas to solid on available surfaces without passing through the liquid phase. It happens all the time down in the valley along the Ompompanoosuc, where the air is rich with moisture from the river, but up in our meadow it is much less common.

I find the edge of a snowbank with larger crystals, feathering out from the snow like little ice ferns. I think of window frost, which also often has a branching structure–in fact called dendrites, from dendron, Greek for ‘tree.’ And dendritic snow crystals are the ones we think of when we imagine the classic snowflake. Each arm tree-like in structure, and fractal: branches emerging from branches emerging from branches, the pattern replicating itself on an ever smaller scale. (As does a tree, less precisely, from trunk to branch to twig.)

Patterns repeating across realms: the vegetative and the crystal; the organic and the mathematical. Branching and re-branching and branching again.

A maple tree. Hoarfrost. Dendritic snowflakes. Fractal replication. Featherfrost. A beautiful sequence. But only one of them has arms large enough to hold a human; so I head back across the meadow to the tree.

Subzero: A Rose-Frosted World

December 11, 2016 In Fall Landscape Tree Weather No Comment

[View with images] Sunday morning, December 11. When I get up the temperature is 1.3 degrees. An hour later it has dropped to -.3. Our first subzero temperature of the winter! I throw on snow pants, boots, coat and gloves, grab the camera, and head out.

There is a rime of frost over everything. The first light is on the opposite hills, and it is rose-colored. The world is white and rose. Separate ice crystals are visible on the twig-ends of the branches in front of me. There is no air movement, so it doesn’t feel that cold, even using the camera with bare hands. There is that perfect stillness that comes with very cold mornings, as light breaks over the world.

Week of Many Snows

December 10, 2016 In Climbing Evening Fall Landscape Snow Weather No Comment

It was a week of many snows. Flurries, gusts, light snowfalls of a few inches. One afternoon a few flakes dropping from dark clouds, the next morning just enough on the ground to require boots, and more falling thickly. I climb at odd times, usually briefly, tucking the tree into gaps in my schedule. Snow becomes customary; cold becomes familiar. Boots and snow pants are useful, since climbing with only one arm you end up getting up onto branches with a knee, instead of being able to pull yourself up properly with two hands onto your feet. I am still not climbing high, because of my injured shoulder. Just into the lower branches. They are brisk climbs, and pleasant, but also routine.

And then one evening it isn’t. There is nothing unusual about the day. Several inches of snow have fallen and piled up on everything. I go out in the near-dark, and even just walking up the lawn everything feels different. There is that bluish-dark light of deep winter, though it is only early December. The world is silent, and vast. There is a sense of presence in the woods, the orchard, the open meadow. Shriveled plant stems are just visible in the field. And when I climb the ladder and enter the treehouse the act feels full of meaning. Stepping from the treehouse into the branches feels sacred. As though I am entering a temple.

I didn’t expect this; I wasn’t looking for it. I thought this would be another routine climb. A few branches up, look out across the lawn, climb back down, and head for the house. Back to making dinner, or whatever was next in my day. Most climbs are like that.

But instead, every curve of branch and mound of snow feels fraught with significance. With every movement of my body I feel like I am participating in a ritual, or a solemn dance.

As I climb, I brush each new branch free of snow with a gloved hand, and I find myself pausing in mid-motion. The snow is capped three or four inches high along each limb. I sweep, and the snow cascades down alongside the trunk and disappears below me. The branch is laid bare. I can see the corrugated patterns of bark, set off by the snow still packed into its crevices. I climb onto this branch and brush the snow off the next, examining the patterns of snow and bark.

I would like to climb the whole tree this way, but I have promised myself not to do so until I can use both hands again. So I content myself with spending some time here, fifteen or twenty feet off the ground, savoring a world made strange. I thank the tree and the night, lower myself back down the few branches into the treehouse, and head for the lights of the front porch.

Quiet; Or, The Twilight Seat

December 1, 2016 In Climbing Evening Fall Landscape Rumination Weather 4 Comments

My destination in the tree has shaped when I choose to climb it, in recent days. Since I am limited by my injured shoulder to the lower branches, since I can’t roam freely about the tree to explore or take pictures—since I can’t swing from branches—I nearly always go out now to climb at twilight. Because the branches I am in offer a natural seat, I end up spending more time in the tree than when I stand at the top. And to sit there at twilight for a long time is deeply beautiful. It has been raining much of the past week, so I go out—in rain pants or snow pants, coat, hat and gloves—pull myself one-handedly into the tree, and just look out over the world.

I watch trees on the opposite hills vanish into the mists. Or disappear behind curtains of rain. And slowly darkness comes down over the world. As it falls, it looks like you could peel the world back in layers of white, gray and black. Mists roll up the hillside and the trees at the far side of the meadow disappear. The house and garage grow dim and distant through the lowering twilight. The near branches, all around me, their bifurcating twig-ends reaching spindly fingers toward the sky, become silhouettes, and then are swallowed up. Lights from the house stand out, soft through the rain, against the darkness.

The soft percussion of raindrops on fallen leaves rises up from below. It is a soundscape very different from summer, when the sound of rain beating on leaves comes from above as well as below, and from every side. When you are in the center of the soundscape, as of a sphere, rather than up above it and looking down on it with your ears. Eventually I bring down my own darkness by closing my eyes so that I can enter this soundscape fully; it replaces the landscape, which is disappearing anyways. For a little while it is my only scape, and I roam around in it.

The shoulder injury has slowed me down, and quieted me. It was so much fun to run up the tree and clamber around that I forgot to stop and just be. From the beginning, being in the tree was supposed to have been an exercise in slowing down; it says a lot about human nature–or my nature–that even so, I needed further constraint to force me to just sit there for a long time, every day, for days at a time.

And so I find, yet again, that, as so often when things go ‘wrong,’ there are unforeseen fruits, unexpected gifts. Maybe grace is as good a name as any for this, in a naturalistic rather than theological sense. But it is the kind of grace that only comes from maintaining a practice. With doing something frequently enough, for long enough, that the unexpected can emerge from it. It comes with climbing, and refusing to not climb, even when climbing is curtailed. It comes from being open to whatever experience might come. It comes from sitting in the tree and listening to the rain, and watching the world get swallowed by mist and slip away into darkness.

The Lower Branches

November 21, 2016 In Climbing Fall Landscape Taoism Weather 2 Comments

[View with images] Overnight I have decided on a compromise. I cannot justify climbing to the top of the tree, but I refuse to not be among the branches! For a time I will have to content myself with hoisting myself one-armed into the lower branches of the tree. There is less risk to my right arm, and if I slip and fall the tree house is not too far below me. These are larger branches than those higher up, and closer together, and form a more easily navigable structure.

On go coat, ski pants, gloves, boots, and out go I, into a gray morning. Everything is covered with several inches of sticky snow. The tree is frosted. I pull myself from the wall of the tree house into the tree, and go a few branches higher. Here I can turn around, face the field, and sit on one snowy branch with my back against another, my feet resting comfortably on a third below. There is a fourth right in front of me, on which to rest my arms. It is in fact a lovely spot. The snowfall of the day before has crusted the branches with snow and ice, and even the smallest twigs bear heavy loads. There are patches of blue sky that leaven the day with color. The world is white, dark gray, and blue. I have the camera with me, and it is a pleasant change to take photographs from a seated position, and at my leisure, albeit with my left hand, which is awkward. I sit there comfortably for some time.

I will admit that once or twice I gaze longingly upwards at the prayer flags twenty feet above me! But I am also deeply grateful just to be in the tree. In fact, my appreciation of it is even sharper now that I have been confronted with the possibility of not being able to climb at all.

And it is good—if not always fun!—to be reminded that we have to live in a state of permanent flexibility and adaptation; that, as the Taoists point out, the unyielding oak tree snaps in the wind-storm before which the slender reed bows and springs erect again.

This is a part of the tree I have rarely spent time in before. There is a whole new branchscape here to explore with the camera. And a new season to explore it in.

I sit and watch the way the light gleams through crusted ice.

Human Flesh, Human Frailty

November 20, 2016 In Climbing Fall Weather 2 Comments

Climbing the tree is so physically effortless at this point that I didn’t really think I would run into any problems with it. But thanks to a too-enthusiastic exercise program, apparently, along with a bit of bad luck, I have hurt my shoulder rather badly. Possibly a rotator cuff injury of some kind. By last Friday I realized that if I were going to climb the tree I would have to do it without using my right arm at all, so as not make worse whatever the injury was.

This turns out to be a good deal more difficult than one might think. It is an awkward business at best, and near the top it seems almost impossible, though I manage to make it up, my right arm dangling at my side. From the road I must look like some kind of injured bug, crawling laboriously up the tree. And this is in perfect climbing conditions: sunny, dry, and unusually warm for the season. It is wonderful to be up here against these odds, but as I stand surveying the world I begin to grapple with the fact that in rain, or dark, or snow, or even temperatures cold enough to require gloves, it will not be possible to make the climb.

I climb one-armed again on Saturday, on another perfect day. I enjoy the beauty of it, sunlight streaming through the tree and the bark warm against my hands, but inevitably, I find myself thinking about the possibility that I might have to stop climbing. About the frailty of flesh. About how fallible, how mortal, our bodies are.

On Sunday, we wake to a heavy, wet, greasy snow. In late morning I will be leaving for work, and returning well after dark. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, I put on ski pants, coat, boots, hat and gloves and go out and stand at the foot of the tree, looking up at the prayer flags. The snow is falling thickly around me and I put an experimental hand on the ladder. It is very slippery. I start up it. The ladder is easy to manage with one arm. I manage to haul myself up onto the wall of the tree house and then into the branches. Gloves make it harder to grip them securely. Somehow, branch by slippery branch, I finagle my body up the tree with one arm, the other dangling at my side or folded against my stomach. It is hard to keep from twisting when I pull myself one-armed up onto a new branch. That second hand makes all the difference, even if it only stabilizes and guides. The footing is greasy and insecure, and occasionally a boot slips a bit on a branch.

I finally make it up to the prayer flags. The snow is falling densely now, gigantic flakes drifting sideways in curtains across the meadow and through the open structure of the tree. It is breathtakingly beautiful, and it’s exhilarating to be up there. But I am also aware that I have done something inexcusably foolish–that I am standing forty feet above the ground in a treacherously slippery tree with the use of only one hand. I grasp this viscerally. And that the journey down the tree will be even more dangerous. And, above all, that my stubbornness in climbing the tree was a greater expression of human frailty than is my injured body.

I make it down without mishap, living to climb another day. But I am forced to begin grappling with the possibility that this other day may not be any time soon. In the vast scheme of things, is this a big deal? No. When faced with the specter of so much else possibly going so wrong with the world over upcoming days and months and years, this is trivial. But still, it is a fount of meaning in my life, and it is, in its own way, a form of protest. An insistence on holding on to something beautiful in a world not always so.

Sometimes saying yes to one thing matters as much as saying no to another.

But tomorrow I may not be able to say yes, at least not in this way.

Aleatory

November 16, 2016 In Fall Photography Prayer Flags Rumination No Comment

[View with images] It is a gorgeous day for mid-November in Vermont. It is just over 50 degrees and sunny. There is a good breeze, but it is still warm. I decide to spend some time in the tree, more time than usual—in fact, to take up not only a camera but a drawing pad and a few drafting pens.

My usual stance in the tree is the one illustrated in the very goofy post, “Exuberance and Playfulness: Or, The Headless Selfie.” It is what in Bagua they would refer to as a 60-40 stance–about 60 percent of my weight is on my back foot, and my forward foot, slightly bent, bears about 40 percent of my weight. Maybe it’s closer to 70-30.

It’s how I imagine one would stand in the prow of a ship, gazing across waves and dolphins and the wine-dark sea to the horizon. It’s a fairly comfortable stance, and also good for standing in the prow of a tree and looking out over waving branches and birds and the sun-fired hills to my own horizon, and I make do with it—but it’s not a good position for drawing or meditation, or anything that requires sitting or the use of both hands.

The only decent place to sit in the tree is lower down, just above the large prayer flags on the other trunk. There I can sit on a branch and lean back against it comfortably, my legs on either side of the trunk. To my left are lawn and meadow, to my right the woods, but I am not high enough to see much of the former. Since the trunk is very nearly in front of my face, there are not many things to draw, but I extract drawing pad and pens from my bag and set to work. I try to capture some of the outlines of the opposite trunk, where a large branch joins it and then the trunk itself splits into two smaller trunks.

My drawing is terrible. I perch the pad on a branch and pull out the camera. Just below me and to my right an oak leaf has gotten caught in the gauzy material of a prayer flag, and the breeze is furling and unfurling the flag, sometimes entangling it with the flag next to it, folding and unfolding them or snapping them taut. The leaf is often caught between two gauzy membranes, a pale light shining through flag and leaf and flag. It is an awkward angle, but I hold the camera as far down as I can reach and take a number of photographs over five or ten minutes. The flags move in the breeze so quickly that in many cases the camera’s autofocus at near range can’t keep up with it—though it does a better job than I could.

When I look at the photographs, I think of aleatory music, music determined partly or wholly by chance. (From the Latin alea, a gambling die.) This is a bit like that, like the sky throwing down a vast handful of air molecules across the game board of our hillside. Whipping the flags this way and that. I put the camera in place and push the shutter, and it extracts a moment from the swirl of leaf and cloth in the wind. The image shaped by the complex forces at play between wind, leaf, flag, cloth, and tree. What isn’t captured of course is movement through time, the swirl itself. The liquid undulation of a prayer flag in the light, trailing an oak leaf.

In either case—still moment extracted in a photograph or flowing movement live—what is produced by this dynamic system of elements at the edge of the wood is more beautiful to me than most music I have heard that was generated partly or wholly by chance. Which makes me wonder–is what I am seeing truly random? Or is it that our ears crave more order than our eyes? But then, I have never heard an ugly stream either.

In any case, I could watch this remarkable thing—this wind-leaf-light-cloth thing—dance all day.

But eventually the sun sinks and I grow cool. I pack up notebook, pens and camera, climb down, and head for the house.

Light So Delicious You Want To Eat It

November 14, 2016 In Evening Fall Prayer Flags Rumination No Comment

[View with images] A quick climb near sunset, which is unnervingly early this time of year. I grab the camera on the way out the door. I am in the tree only briefly, but it is long enough to take a few photographs of the lower prayer flags that, when I view them later, make me as hungry as I now am in the tree. It makes me want to stuff a prayer flag in my mouth with the light still on it. Like some kind of celestial sauce. Hungry for the look and feel of the flags. For their essence. Hungry for light itself.

What to call this species of hunger? A desire to consume the world, to take the whole of it inside oneself. Or maybe to lose oneself in it to the point of drowning. A soul lost forever in the radiant depths of the world.

A gleam of light shooting from the setting sun and glancing off a prayer flag in the clear air. The glow of presence in the cloth and onto it and from it, all at the same time. Soft, this light, but not like the softness of summer light—not diffused by water-bearing air. This air is like crystal. This light is soft from the lateness of the sun. The weakness of the light revealing the strength of the thing. The tissue of existence glowing as if with its own radiance.

I look up the etymology of ‘soft.’ It traces back through Old English and the Saxon to the Proto-Germanic ‘samftijaz’: ‘level, even, smooth, gentle.’ Compare to the Proto-Indo-European root ‘sem’: ‘one’ or ‘whole.’

I find this connection irresistible. Looking at these prayer flags in this light, I am haunted by a sense of their oneness and their wholeness, in fact by a sense of their own-ness (though I am not entirely sure what I mean by this), hanging as they are in the sky, radiant with their own being in the soft light. Utterly intact.

And at the same time, how fitting, how right, that their one, their whole, their own, should be revealed by the light of something other than themselves. That they have their being, as we know it, in and through the sun, not in and of themselves.

When the sun drops below the horizon, they are extinguished. They are still folded and draped, but they have gone flat. They have their own-ness still, but it has changed dramatically.

Now they are a whisper hanging at the edge of the wood.

Supermoon

November 13, 2016 In Fall Landscape Night Rumination 2 Comments

[View with images] I can’t resist going into the tree tonight to observe the so-called “supermoon.” It is the moon’s closest approach to the earth in 68 years and it will appear 14% larger than usual, I hear on the radio as I am driving around today.

On the way home from Hanover Emme and I check out the moon on the horizon and decide that there is nothing super about. It looks pretty much like it always does.

But any reason to be in the tree is a good reason, so up I go with the camera. I find myself in a Gothic world of tangled vines and branches. An enclosed wood, with a thousand thousand arms against the sky. Woods like a cage, protective, confining, it’s not clear. Woods haunted by the moon.

These are the woods in which Hansel and Gretel get lost and are nearly devoured. The woods in which one might search for supernatural creatures and then regret finding them. They are the woods into which one might go to burrow deep into one’s own psyche. They are the woods of myth and dreams. Dark counterpoint to the forest lush with green and birdsong and summer light. And yet—the same woods. Each living inside the other.

Everyone should go walking at night at least once, alone, and sit in woods like these.

They are, like all woods, unnervingly beautiful.

Dogs and Trees

November 12, 2016 In Climbing Company Fall No Comment

A very Novemberish Friday. Veteran’s Day. No school for Emme, or work for me. The day is mostly cloudy, with occasional breaks of blue sky. Its most prominent feature is the wind, which is coming up the hill in gusts of 40 mph. Fallen leaves are whipped about in the air, a loose screen door slams open and shut until I pull it tight. And the temperature is dropping quickly. I climb in a thick fleece-lined sweater, which in the house seemed adequate but is no barrier up here to the sharp knives of the wind.

It is beautiful in the tree, I am rocked about by the gusts, I get cold very quickly. I climb down to the dogs waiting eagerly below me.

This ritual around climbing the tree has become one of the best things about it. I walk out the front door and move past the car onto the lawn—and the dogs go nuts. They erupt into a frenzy of excitement. Sometimes it starts even before this, when I am kneeling to put on shoes inside the house, and they think it’s likely that this is one of those outings, and I am not just heading for the car. If I pick up the camera they know they’ve got it made.

As I walk up the lawn towards the tree, they race alongside me, leaping and barking. They tear off in wide arcs, chasing each other, and circle back. Nutmeg nudges my hand excitedly with her nose, or my leg, as she trots beside me. And then lunges for Quillan, rolling him down the slope to keep me all to herself. He is on his feet in the blink of an eye, unfazed, racing back towards us. I rub their heads vigorously, encouraging their excitement because it’s all such fun. I wrestle a bit with Nutmeg. Sometimes we run towards the tree, all three of us together.

And then I am up the ladder and gone. Sometimes Nutmeg stands on her hind legs, her forepaws on the ladder, looking up into the tree. Early on in my tree climbing, if she caught sight of me among the branches she would raise the alarm with repeated staccato barks. Get down, you fool! That’s no place for a dog! It unnerved her that I would be such an idiot as to be up there, where the ground exists only in narrow strips and at irregular intervals, and with a chasm beneath. Our lupine and simian ancestries are never more apparent. She, descended from wolves and their grabless paws. I, fortunate possessor of thumbs and arms.

But now she is used to it, and they ignore me when I am up there. They race off together to explore the stone wall, seeing chipmunks and snakes invisible to me with their noses; or roam about individually, sniffing the lawn; or sit quietly and gaze off over the meadow.

When I come down, their excitement re-ignites. Nutmeg rockets over from wherever she is, Quillan racing along behind her. Because here is the payoff: if there is no other time in the day when they get things thrown for them, there is at least this. Nutmeg noses my hand, again and again, eyes bright, darting away and back, as we scour the lawn together for a stick or ball. If I see something and start toward it, she will lunge to try to get it first. I get a foot down and turn my body to block her.

If all I can find is a twig, I hand it to her and she tears it apart vigorously. A larger stick gets thrown and she goes bulleting over lawn, driveway, and more lawn to get it, with her preternatural ability to stay beneath it–is she following its sound in the air above her? Then I look for another stick for Quillan, he of the eternal grin, who runs over with his tail wagging so hard the back end of his body looks like it could hit him in the head. The first dog to knock himself out from sheer happiness. He seizes it from my hand and carries it off to a private spot to chew it into pieces.

Their sheer joy in these moments!

At least one of the reasons we love our dogs so much.

Especially in days such as these.

Twenty-Three and Four

November 2, 2016 In Fall Rumination Tree No Comment

[View with images] A clear, sunny day with a haze over the hills from the unexpected warmth, just over 60 degrees. At a distance things are soft; up close, here in the tree, branches are sharp and clear against the open sky.

Twenty-three. The number of leaves remaining on my tree, at my best count. I search the twigs of the farthest branches, take care to distinguish which belong to other trees in the back, where branches cross. Twenty-three lone, curled, dried-up leaves clinging to to the tree. This might sound like a lot, but in the immense branching double lobe of the tree, it is almost none. It has been estimated that a mature tree can have 200,000 leaves in summer. In which case roughly one ten thousandth of this tree’s leaves remain.

Twenty-three does not include a dozen or so other leaves that remain on the tree in three dense clusters of five to ten leaves each. In each case, the branchlet supporting these leaves is visibly broken, snapped where it meets its branch but still hanging on. There must be something about the connection between tree and leaf that allows–compels?–the leaf to fall. Which is kind of interesting if you think about it: they cannot become separate if they are not fully joined.

Curious, I read about what makes leaves fall, and learn that the tree, in order to rid itself of foliage before winter, sends a chemical message to each leaf. This hormone triggers the growth of a band of abscission cells in the stem of the leaf that makes the stem brittle, and eventually pushes the leaf away from the tree. And this of course solves the riddle: if the branch supporting the leaves is partially broken, the message doesn’t make it through. They have nowhere to go.

I’m not sure why I don’t count these leaves. Perhaps because they feel like an aberration. They don’t represent the natural rate at which leaves fall from my tree as the weather grows colder.

Four. The number of oak leaves that have taken up temporary residence in the tree. Falling from a nearby oak tree, they slipped down through the branches of the maple and got hung up. They rest here, suspended in tiny nets of twigs. The maple leaves still on the tree are small, chalky brown, and twisted. These oak leaves are altogether nobler: wide, flat, a burnished reddish brown when the sun shines through them. It’s almost enough to make me wish I climbed an oak tree every day. Two of them lie on their backs in their twig-nests, shifting slightly from their beds in the erratic breeze. A third is suspended from the bottom of a prayer flag by threads that have come unraveled in the wind. The last, my favorite, has against all odds been speared by a twig and now dangles vertically, stem up, swiveling gently in the moving air. It looks like it drifted down in such a way that it fell over the twig, but the hole is so small this seems impossible.

The image of this leaf, pierced by the twig it dangles from, draws me. I can’t tell why I find it so powerful. True, we have all been pierced through the heart. And this leaf looks like a shrike hung it there, upon a thorn. But there is something noble about it, too. It is not down there on the forest floor. It remains high up in a tree. The way it rocks with the slightest air movement: it must feel contented. And it has been penetrated by the world; it is not curled into itself, intact and shielded, carpeted by the bodies of its own. It faces the wood and is backlit by the sun. And it is joined, for a little while, with a twig that has made leaves of another kind. And is now, for a little while, a kind of impromptu stem for it.

It is kind of violent and kind of beautiful at the same time. It’s a tiny thing, this pierced leaf at the edge of the wood, but unexpectedly moving.

Shit on a Stick

November 1, 2016 In Fall Rumination Tree No Comment

It is a chilly 34 degrees out and I am up among the branches with a roll of paper towels, a sponge, and a bucket of soapy water. I am standing on a branch about thirty feet above the ground, balancing precariously, the paper towels tucked under the arm that holds the bucket, sponging off a branch with the other hand.

Last night: Halloween. I climb at 9:40 pm, in the dark, just after Kim leaves to pick up Emme from a post-trick-or-treating bonfire, and before leaving myself for “the pig corner” to collect Claire from a Revels-rehearsal carpool. It is cold but invigorating, and it is a pleasure to be up at my perch for a few moments, looking across at the silhouette of the hills against the night sky.

I turn and start my descent. A few branches down my hand comes away suspiciously tacky. And again a few branches below that. I don’t need to sniff my boots to confirm why. Had I tracked something up from the trick-or-treating circuit in the village, or collected it walking across our lawn? I would guess the former, as I have never seen our dogs go on this side of the house. I groan, probably audibly.

And so here I am, the next day, irritatedly soaping branches thirty feet off the ground. At least it is clear which branches got hit; it required a certain angle of one foot to scrape it from the arch of the sole onto the bark. As I scrub, soapy water splashes from the branch and scatters as it falls, hitting other branches on the way down. My jeans have gotten wet and quickly begin to feel cold against my skin in the near-freezing temperatures. For a moment I wedge the bucket between my legs so I can hang on to a branch with one hand and lean out to reach a second branch with the sponge in my other hand. The roll of paper towels drops out from under my arm and goes tumbling down among the branches to the ground. I swear under my breath. This is far from what I imagined when I first conceived of climbing the tree every day. I wedge the bucket between trunk and branch and climb down after the paper towels, experimenting with other expletives as I go.

As I am climbing back up, I start to laugh. Spiritual practice indeed! This is how I think of climbing, and how I experience it, sometimes more overtly, sometimes less so. And here I am up in the air, wet and cold, scrubbing shit from branches! So much for moonlight and fireflies and warm rain and morning sun and sheltering foliage and prayer flags in the snow! So much for rhapsody and exaltation!

And then, of course, I think of the Zen master Ummon–because who wouldn’t? When a disciple asked him, “What is the Buddha?” Ummon answered, “Shit on a stick.” Or “shit stick,” depending on the translation. I like “shit on a stick.” It’s got a good rhythm to it. It refers in either case to the results of a method of cleaning oneself prior to the invention of toilet paper. And here I was, dealing with literal shit on a stick. On a number of them, actually, all up and down the tree.

I don’t know what Ummon meant by this, and I am not a Buddhist, but several possibilities come to mind. Most of them have to do with deconstructing the categories with which we sort and organize the world. We tend to look for the spiritual in what is beautiful. We want to learn from what is lofty. If the Buddha were a thing, it would be a lotus flower–not shit on a stick. Ummon shakes us from our complacency, tells us to think differently.

But it goes deeper than this. It is not just that we want the spiritual to be beautiful, and shit is not. It is that we want there to be a Buddha, of some kind, somewhere. An answer, an objective, a solution. (Our Buddha may be romantic love, financial power, adrenaline, social or environmental activism.) The Zen master Linji said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Any Buddha you may encounter, or can imagine, is not the real Buddha; kill it and move on. Keep practicing; keep searching.

Shit on a stick.

Kill the Buddha.

What we love, we idealize. When I think of the tree, I think of my most beautiful and intense experiences up here: ice storms, high winds, violet sunsets, backlit leaves glowing green against the shadows of the wood behind, morning sun coming through prayer flags, the depthless blue skies of January. The drab days of March, all gray branches, gray skies, gray lichens crusted with ice? Not so much. The climb devoid of interest, beauty, inspiration? A quick run up and down before heading off to work? Not so much.

This is a good reminder that the Buddha is here too. That the Buddha that is nowhere is also everywhere. That this tree, with shit on the branches, is also my tree. That balancing with bucket and sponge and paper towels in the pale sunlight is its own strange kind of spiritual practice. And it’s also pretty damned funny, which counts for a lot. In fact, I now find myself in an absurdly good mood as soapy water splashes down the tree. I catch myself laughing out loud.

This is a good reminder to think carefully about why I climb the tree. What am I seeking up here?

I am looking for a little bit of wisdom. I am looking for beauty, and for a closer relation to the natural world. I am looking for a miniature transubstantiation, each day. But in a way, climbing the tree is also asking a question. A question like, What is the Buddha? Or, What should I do if I meet him?

I lay myself open to whatever answer might come each time I start up among the branches.

In short: I climb the tree to find out why I am climbing the tree.

Shit helps.

And maybe this is why I am now in a spectacularly good mood. I am very nearly whistling as I scrub away; in fact I find myself humming “I Am Near the Gate,” a new piece from the community chorus Claire and I belong to.

When I have washed off all the branches I douse them with rubbing alcohol, returning the tree to an antiseptic state of cleanliness unnecessary to it, and to the insects, birds, and other critters that inhabit and pass through it.

What is the Buddha? Shit on a stick. And what did I do when I met this Buddha? I killed him with rubbing alcohol. But not before receiving from him the gift of one of my most memorable days among the branches.

And now I sit for a minute, the tree awash with pale sunlight around me.

Blown Open

October 21, 2016 In Climbing Fall Tree Weather No Comment

Five-thirty. Kim has gone to collect Claire and six of her friends from a soccer game to return to the house for a sleepover. The already dark day begins to darken more. After days of rain, a wind has come up, spattering drops against windows and the side of the house. I cross the lawn to the tree and look up. The last two days I have been up there taking pictures in the rain, of fallen leaves that have clung to branches, yellow and watery against luminously green moss. The foliage had thinned already, even then, from the dense mantle of summer to a mass of leaves that was lighter and airier, but still uniform.

Today it is different. The wind has had its way with the tree. Only a scattering of leaves remain. The lawn in front and the woods behind are thickly carpeted in orange, yellow, brown. I start up the ladder of branches and it is like walking into a new world. The tree is open to the landscape, to the sky. A wind blows through it unobstructed. What leaves remain are isolated from one another, one here and another there and a scattering more over there, out on the end of twigs, on separate branches. They have lost their collective existence. No more the tree’s foliage, no more its mantle of leaves, they are now individuals, the lingerers, the hangers-on, the holders-out.

I climb carefully; the tree is slick from days of rain, a slippery organic film coating the branches. Mosses are vibrant against the impending twilight. When I stand at the top a damp wind blows up the hillside, through the branches, across me. There is a mist on the hills cloaking the subdued colors of what foliage remains. But mostly I look at the sky, at how much of it there is through the now-empty branches. Or rather: before, I would see the sky between the branches. Now I see branches against the immense expanse of the sky. A small shift in perspective, but one which entirely changes the experience of being in up there.

The tree has been blown open. It is no longer a place to shelter, to be in secret. It is no longer a space or entity that one can be inside of, as when in summer, while clambering among the branches beneath its dense cloak of leaves, I am profoundly, intimately, inside the tree. I recall writing this some past season: that now, however close I get to the trunk, I am still always only in the sky. That is it exactly. And this is new to me, that I have done this long enough that one season now can be charged with the reverberations of another.

But with loss comes gain, in the tree as everywhere. Intimacy has been exchanged for expansiveness. The door to the sky has been thrown open. The tree has changed from enclosure to threshold. From being a contained and inward-looking space to one that is full of wind and rain and sky–and, on the next sunny day, will be full of light. Drenched with light. Being up there then will be like being held up to the sky by a giant hand.

I climb slowly down through branches that now are just drenched with water, and return to the house to finish making spaghetti.

Soaked Through

October 19, 2016 In Fall Miscellanea Tree Weather No Comment

[View with images] Everything is wet, soaked through. Leaves are beginning to come down. The floor of the tree house is covered with them. When I climb, I find fallen leaves clinging wetly to branches. They are tiny, a lot of them, almost miniature, just an inch across, or two. It had seemed to me that the leaves on the tree were smaller this summer than last. I had wondered if the drought had shrunk them, if when they had needed to be replete with water the tree had been thirsty and unable to siphon enough through to them. Next summer I will know to compare.

But they are beautiful, these tiny leaves, golden-yellow, spotted with brown, collecting droplets of rain on their veined surfaces. The mosses along the branches are vibrantly green from days of rain, the branches themselves are dark against the carpet of yellow foliage beginning to gather on the lawn beneath. I perch on slippery branches, do my best to shelter the camera from a downpour, and take pictures.

Ablaze

October 17, 2016 In Fall Landscape Photography No Comment

[View with images] Radiant. Ablaze. Luminous. Charged with light. As though the world itself were made of the stuff.

And then I give up. These last several days are ones best experienced; and if not experienced, at least seen.

And so I release myself from the obligation of writing, and you into a small world of images.

Apple

October 10, 2016 In Fall Rumination No Comment

[View with images] Today when I climb I am greeted by a small but interesting change in this tiny kingdom. Some creature has made it a larder. Nestled in a crotch of the tree, where a large limb meets the trunk, right at the top of the ladder, is a small apple. It is bright red and neatly chewed, tooth marks lined up in parallel, working from the edges in towards the center. About half of it is eaten. I am guessing that I have happened onto one of the many secret pantries of the red squirrel that daily torments Nutmeg and Quillan, our dogs, who forever live as though they might some day actually catch it, thousands of utterly fruitless mad dashes over the years notwithstanding. It is far too quick for them and there are stone walls and trees everywhere. A chipmunk does the same, day after day, perching on the edge of the deck to nibble a seed and then, when they light out of the house baying like hell hounds on a hunt, simply pops under the deck and is gone.

But is this not how we live too? Laying up apples among the trees of our days, bits of nourishment here and packets of pleasure there? One for tomorrow evening, another for next weekend? A big one for next summer? Small things to feed us, or to look forward to? We do our best to stock our forests, though it sometimes feels like most trees are empty, like the cupboard is bare. Hence all the running around. And probably why TV was invented. And the tormenting of dogs.

And, with the dogs, we never abandon the conviction that we will one day savor that taste–that eventually some hot, mad dash will end with the small carcass limp in our mouths. It keeps us going. It’s what makes us human. It’s what we do when the trees are empty. Hence all the running around. And probably why TV was invented. Along with the chasing of squirrels.

I leave the apple behind and continue up towards the prayer flags, which snap in the sunlight in a light breeze. [View with images]

Primal Gods or Monsters

September 29, 2016 In Fall Night No Comment

For several consecutive days I climb at night. The full moon is gone and the nights are plunged into shadow. Always the sky has a kind of dark glow, stars scattered across it like handfuls of luminous sand, but everything beneath, deprived of moonlight, is black. I turn out all the lights on the tree side of the house and venture out into the night with hands stretched out, feeling my way off the porch and across the driveway and lawn.

The trees around me rear up against the sky and stars like primal gods or monsters, jagged or rounded or branching thrustings-up of a blackness so dense, so palpable, that it presses against the eyeball like some kind of cottony mass. It is visceral; it clings. It fills all the space between, like something with mass. I look up at the stars. The Milky Way streams from the top of the tree. But around me the darkness is almost palpable, as though you could lean against it. I grope for the ladder among the saplings at the edge of the woods for a few moments, and am chagrined to find that I am a dozen feet to the left of it among the blackberry brambles. I back up onto the lawn and drift sideways, feeling for an opening. I find the ladder a foot or two in and make my way up it.

As I climb I look upwards and see a handful of stars here and there in the gaps between the leaves. In winter when the branches are bare, the stars are in their full glory, blazoning down in force, branches and twigs laying black lines against their brilliant tapestry. But now they can only cluster in the openings to peer in.

I climb by touch alone, and it becomes almost unavoidably a caressing sort of business. When you’ve got nothing else to go on but feel, you feel. You glide a hand along a branch when you find it, you lean against the reassuring trunk. You rub the bark and lichens, and that sensation, along with the pressure of foot on branch, is the only thing going on in your world. It magnifies, and fills the void.

From my high place, I look out at the black silhouette of the hills against the faintly luminous sky and its uncountable stars.

As my eyes adjust, I see the barest hint of shapes around me, just suggestions of darkness against the dark; but looking downwards there is only utter and uniform blackness. An abyss. I start down into it. It is more difficult than climbing up; for some reason it is harder to find branches below you than above, and harder with feet than with hands. I lower myself down and hang in the darkness, feeling around for a branch with my feet. Occasionally I find one unexpectedly with shin or knee. And again. And again. The lower in the tree I go the fewer openings there are through which to see sky and stars. It is like climbing down into a well. The deep well of the wood.

And then I am down and on the lawn, and standing with my head thrown back, gazing up at Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper and the bright, dusty ribbon of the Milky Way.

And then back to the house.

Equinox

September 21, 2016 In Fall No Comment

The first leaves are changing. Along the roadsides, at the edges of fields and woods, there are scatterings of yellow and rust among the green. As you drive along, a few leaves spin down from overhanging branches onto the road and collect at intersections. In the woods behind the tree a beech sapling has gone brilliant yellow, and I look down on it from above, a spray of light among the shadows of the wood. We have had several days of unseasonable heat and humidity. Today is clear and drier, but the sun is still hot.

It is also the autumnal equinox: time of balance, evenness, equipoise. Day and night, evenly divided. Sunset and sunrise, at the same minute on the clock. There is as much light as dark, as much dark as light, balanced in the pans of an old-fashioned scale, the universe blindfolded like justice, measuring them out without prejudice.

It doesn’t feel like this. How can a time of year that is all change and flux, moving from summer into winter, back to school, new and crazy schedules, the evenness and warmth of long summer days disrupted, leaves threatening to drop to the ground in drifts, full moons like floodlights, winter’s darkness impending–how can this be a time of balance, of evenness? Of equipoise?

How strange that the time of greatest balance is the time of greatest change, mid-way on the journey from the longest day of summer to the longest night of winter. A time more chaotic than either extreme. I think of the yin-yang symbol. Summer contains the seed of darkness, and we are in that seed, and it is growing.

Sometimes feelings mirror seasons and there is a kind of harmony between oneself and the world. Sometimes anguish appears in its scarlet trace among the trees around us and also in our hearts. We see it and know it and it is us. The disruption of days and the wheeling of seasons and the slow descent into darkness. Pain in us as there is in the world.

Climbing the tree serves many functions. One of them is that it provides a place of refuge. A sanctuary from the world. A place to go where others are not. A place to be, alone, with the field spread out below, and the far hillsides coming back from across the meadow and the road and the valley like answers to the stark question that I am. (Have we not all felt this way at one time or another?)

And there is a consolation in the softness of the light, or the clear strong shadows of the hills stretched out across the valley, or the many shades of green along the ridges, or the way the trees in the distance glow with the setting sun, and it eases us.

Some Other Owl

September 13, 2016 In Fall Night No Comment

I pick up Claire from soccer and then Emme from her friend’s house after a French lesson. The sun is setting as we head for home. As I turn onto the bottom of our road the car suddenly starts jolting rhythmically and I pull over. The rear passenger tire has blown out completely. I restart the car and on three tires we gingerly make our way the remaining three quarters of a mile up the hill to the house.

Half an hour later, Kim and I are out in the driveway in the dark with lanterns and flashlights, replacing the tire for an early morning trip to Wilson’s Tires. We are nearly done when there is rush of air in the leaves behind us. We turn and shine a flashlight into a small maple tree at the edge of the driveway. A good-sized barred owl is sitting there, no more than ten feet away, staring at us unblinkingly. I run to the house for the girls and when we come out it is still there. We watch it for a while, marveling at the brown and white streaked plumage of its breast, the yellow hook of its beak, its large dark eyes. After several minutes we turn back to the tire and the owl is almost soundlessly gone.

Some time later, the tire fixed and dinner done, I go back out of the house into the night. I feel my way across the lawn, blinded, and find the ladder by touch. By the time I am halfway up the tree my eyes have adjusted, and I begin to make out shapes and shadows. I stand at the top of the tree and listen. After a few minutes I hear a barred owl calling, but it is distant, faint, coming from some far hill. I imagine our owl gliding across fields, winging tree to tree through the shadowy woods, making its silent way to that distant hillside, and calling back through the night; but I know that the one I am hearing is some other owl. Still, I feel strangely connected to it.

I listen for several minutes–a few minutes feels much longer, time becomes elastic and stretches out almost endlessly in the dark–and then feel my way down from the tree and head back to the brightly lit house.

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