Twice this past week, once on Wednesday, after school and before work in the evening, and once late Sunday afternoon, Emme and I, and on Sunday Claire as well, walk a mile or so in from a local road to a place along a river where acres of Jerusalem artichokes are in full bloom. Thousands of sunflower-like blossoms about three inches across, massing at the top of six- to eight-foot stems, nod and sway in the breeze. The grassy track leads through them, parting this ocean, and in places they lean in from both sides, creating archways of green and gold. We carry in Emme’s hammered dulcimer and its stand to take some video of her playing there in the slanting late afternoon sunlight. It is a scene of surpassing beauty.
On the walk back to the car the trees are shot through with light, and the smell of the dried leaves crunching underfoot is enriched in places by that of fermenting apples. A black and seed-filled mound of bear scat at the side of the track suggests that a feast of them was enjoyed not long ago.
And walking along here, among the trees, I am suddenly replete. I don’t know how else to put it. I am full, and overflowing. The trials and tribulations that life inevitably brings vanish; and all is brimming and bounty, in a quiet, deep way.
This is one of the reasons I climb the tree, for moments like these. They don’t come often, but they wouldn’t come at all if I didn’t climb. The practice of climbing is like casting a net to see what it will catch. That moment when woodcocks and barred owls are calling at the same time, or brushing snow off the branches as I climb feels intimate and sacred, or the tree blazes with light in fall, or Claire and her friends are singing in the tree; and one is, unexpectedly, replete. The world brims. Fullness is its gift. But always an ephemeral one, for we were not made to hold so much; not always or for long.
Maybe this makes climbing a different kind of practice than the practice of an instrument, or a sport, or a martial art. Those forms of practice are directed at mastery. Maybe it’s more like the practice of writing, or of prayer: waiting to see what comes. Waiting to see what will be caught next in its weave of days and nights.
This tree, my net. Catching me, again and again, in this brimming world. I think of last winter, the later months of it, and early spring, and the barrenness of climbing, day after day after day of making my way up among the branches and not knowing why, but not giving up; and of the intermittent riches that have followed.
And I’m not sure why, but I think of a short poem from a book on my desk, Sky Above, Great Wind: The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan, by Kazuaki Tanahashi:
I don’t regard my life
As insufficient.
Inside the brushwood gate
There is a moon,
There are flowers.
