A week or so ago I go out into the late evening to call Emme in for dinner. As I walk down the driveway an owl slides silently past into a near tree. I stop and watch it on its branch. Its head swivels to stare back. After a few minutes I walk closer—not so much to get a better look in the near-dark, but because I’m drawn to it and want to be near. When I get too close it drops from its branch and with a few slow flaps glides across the lawn, back toward the woods, and—lo and behold!—into my tree. It is about thirty feet up, perched on a branch I make use of in my ascent every day, but a bit further out from the trunk than would support my weight.
Maybe I should let it be; or maybe I should engage with the night on the same terms as it has; make as free with my desires and needs as it does. It feels no need to let a mouse be. I spend more time in those branches than it does. So I follow it across the lawn. As I get near the ladder, it drops and in a moment has crossed through the middle of the tree to a branch on the other trunk and a little lower down, a little closer to me. I stand still and we stay like that a while, watching each other. Then without seeming to move it is gone, gliding through the night into the woods behind.
A few days later it is a perfect late afternoon in the high 70s, warm and drenched with sunlight. I go out of the house holding a heavy plastic bag at arm’s length. I am headed for the compost pile with a slurry of rotting potatoes. There is no worse smell in heaven or earth than rotting potatoes. “The rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril,” I believe Shakespeare wrote somewhere, though probably not about decomposing tubers from the nightshade family. When the whole mess is deposited on the mound of orange peels, broccoli stems and eggshells, I decide it is a good time for a quick climb up the tree before heading off to work in half an hour. It’s so warm out, so luxuriously welcoming, that I shed shoes and shirt and make my first barefoot climb of the year.
Budbreak was a week ago. Each leaf-cluster is about two inches across. I am forty feet up in the air, surrounded by a thousand twigs extruding tenderly feathering membranes. I am standing in the midst of a vast constellation of green against a brilliantly blue sky. I am warmed, deeply, sunlight against chest and shoulders, face, arms. The world has gone sensual.
The tree has not been mine, nor I its. Not for months now. I have kept up the practice, I have climbed every day without fail, but, a few moments aside, the practice has been empty. Life has my energies fractured and devoured; to keep climbing still was a kind of defiance. A refusal to give up. A way of saying no and yes at the same time; and so at least an assertion. Empty practice is better than no practice. Plowing and sowing, again and again, digging in that cover crop one more time in the hope of enriching the field for the possibility of growth and harvest down the road; and if not this field, then perhaps some other.
And today, unexpectedly, the practice changes, evolves from within. Suffused with warmth, drenched with sunlight, surrounded by glowing budburst leaves, I start climbing down—but as slowly as I am able to move. Each branch an hour in the passing, it seems. Each movement poised, composed, considered, befriended, known, and surrendered into the arms of the next. The texture of every branch savored in hand and arch of foot, become an extended massage in the slow turn of the body, rotating slowly in preparation for the next lowering. I climb down to the lowest branches like this, then turn and climb back up, as slowly; and then back down again. On the next ascent I move more freely, more playfully, turning when I don’t need to, moving arms or legs extravagantly when so moved, sliding luxuriously between branches. For a while I close my eyes and climb, all sensation reduced to sunlight and shadow against eyelids, warm ridged bark against hand, foot, knee. I am dancing my way up and down the tree, gracefully if not to the eye then to the spirit. I traverse the verticality of the tree three or four times this way, using the branches as a scaffolding for playful and deeply felt movement, and I feel myself expanding, relaxing, opening out. I inhale the literal sweetness of spring air along with the occasional whiff of distant rotting potatoes. And it is good. The world has grown rich again. The tree is mine once more. The fallow field feels fertile at last.
“Taking back the tree.” Every part of this small sentence is wrong. You can’t “take” a tree, unless you mean its timber. And then you haven’t really got the tree, you just have wood. As with pretty much everything that matters in life, you can only be given it. And often unexpectedly; I hadn’t imagined this post-potato climb would be any different from usual. But after many months, the tree has given itself to me again.
But it isn’t most essentially itself that the tree has given me, when I think about it (though it has done that too). What it has given back to me most essentially is myself. I n a tree one climbs up to go down—to send a taproot as far down into experience, life, self, as possible. In rooting ourselves we find ourselves. I am the gift the tree has given me.
But I reflect on the word “back,” and I see that this too is wrong. As always with these things, really, I was in possession of myself, or at least a close neighbor, all along. I just needed to undergo the internal process of recovery, of rebirthing, as we all do in life again and again. Assisted partly by, of all things, a tree (but not only a tree; I have also been reading, talking, writing, meditating). Tree as midwife to the self. There is work to be done, re-finding oneself when buffeted by winds of change and conflict, always more work of exploration—of stretching, breaking, and reforming—and metamorphosis is painful—but that good work has begun. That work of renewed self-possession—of the dance of giving and taking in the growth of the self.
This past Friday evening I get home from Bagua late in the evening, at twilight. I go straight from the car to the tree, and it is dark enough that I am among the branches before I realize—with a bit of a start—that there is someone up there with me. Emme is leaning back against the trunk, motionless in the dark. She tells me that moments earlier there was an owl in the tree too, swiveling its head among the branches of the other trunk.
I think of the owl of Minerva, symbolic of the wisdom of the goddess Athena, and of Hegel’s gnomic line that the owl of Minerva always flies at dusk. I think of the owl of wisdom alighting in the tree of the self; and that I am, after all, taking back the tree.
