Weeks go by and the weather is monotonous, the landscape bleak, the tree uneventful. It would be easy to stop climbing at times like this. The practice feels empty of inner inspiration. But I carry on, waiting. Life can be like this, too. Sometimes you just have to shoulder through the rough spots, with patience, and a sense of openness for what might come.
And I am reminded in these weeks that the tree is not just the tree. The tree is everything that neighbors it. In the world, in time, in me. It is like a magnetic pole that stands up from the earth, bending meanings around it; and in turn can receive its meaning from things not itself. In a short span I enjoy three instances of this.
Claire and I, on our way to community chorus one Thursday night, and again coming home, late, become deeply absorbed in conversation about the music of Bob Dylan, listening raptly to the whole of Mr. Tambourine Man three or four times, and talking about Carl Jung and archetypal images in music, in culture, in dreams. In the midst of this, rehearsal: the intent absorption in parts, in melody and harmony and lines fitting together. When we finally get home, I head for the tree—and the tree is saturated. I stand at the top, and the wind blows anciently through the branches in a way it would not if the prior hours had been spent differently.
I spend a recent weekend immersed (and unquestionably, if joyously, out of my depth) in the ocean of music that is the Village Harmony Winter Weekend on Lake Morey: Corsican, Appalachian, South African, Sardinian, English rounds, American shape note, Balkan, Gospel, and on and on and on, eighty or ninety of us. Singing until my throat is hoarse, hour after hour, barely keeping my head above these glorious waters. Since I am there for two nights, on Saturday I am in need of a tree to climb. I slip away from lunch early and set off down a path into the woods. It is gray and the snow has rotted into puddles of slush and all the trees along the track are forest trees, with no branches for dozens of feet off the ground. I finally find a smallish yellow birch and make my careful way up among branches no bigger round than quarters, hugging the slender trunk as I go in case one of them gives way. Fifteen or twenty feet off the ground there is nowhere else to go. And so I stay there a while, in an awkward half-crouch among the branches, wrapped around the trunk.
And it is good. It is good because my face is pressed into a trunk ruffled with curled golden fringes of bark. I have never climbed a yellow birch before. Its dust is on my cheekbone. And it is good because I am full of music, swimming in it, and so I don’t need to get forty feet off the ground to get high. I would like to say that the tree is music and music is the tree, and that they are one and that is why I am happy, perched in this ridiculous sapling fifteen feet off the ground—but maybe that would going too far.
Another night I get home from work late in the evening. I park the car and drop my bag in the driveway, heading up the slope of the lawn over icy snow to the tree. I make my way into the branches, climbing upwards through the empty night. The solitude of climbing at night can be mesmerizing, but tonight it is late and I am tired and I want to get inside and eat. I reach the top and stand for a minute, inhaling the breeze, when I am startled to see a dim light below me and off to the right. It takes me a minute to grasp that it’s Emme, sitting on the garage roof in the night and listening to music on her phone. I had parked two stories beneath her. I call down and she calls back.
And I suddenly feel, at the same time, Emme high up on the roof overlooking the world, and Emme far below me—and the delight of this disjunction in space and perspective, and the delight at finding I have company, and the delight that Emme is the kind of person who sits on roofs late at night to listen to music, renders the tree joyful in a way it has not been for some time.
And so I keep on climbing, taking comfort from these things: that I do not know what my next climb will be like, or what may rescue a given day from the banal; that people and music and conversations and the night can make a tree; that everything we do takes its meaning from everything else; that this interweaving in and of our lives is what makes us human; and that all these things are the grounds for the continual possibility of hope, however dark the days.
