It is late at night, and there is a stupendous full moon. As I cross to the tree, inky shadows lie tangled on the snow. The immense orb lies behind the woods, and shadows lean out toward me as I approach. Everything is dark and luminous at the same time.
The silence is absolute.
Periodically I question this venture. I missed a few days climbing when we first returned from India, possibly from severe jet lag and losing several nights’ worth of sleep (one of them unexpectedly spent in the Bangalore airport)—or the cultural disorientation of re-entry—or the shock of moving from 85 degrees to 10 below. Maybe it was that I was still so saturated with the orange earth and the baking hills, the explosion of life and color that is India, that I continued to find it hard to imagine my monochromatic tree even though it was just across the lawn. But I think it was more than that. I think it bespoke some deeper psychic upheaval. A recognition so profound that there was no energy left for anything else.
The sky is immense when I get up into it. The moon is so brilliant that most stars are washed out. The hills seem to luminesce and recede into their own shadows simultaneously.
I’ve been thinking about abundance, and about some of the ways I fail to experience it, and therefore also about lack. And I was remembering that in Plato eros is described as the offspring of dearth and plenty, emptiness and fullness, completeness and incompleteness. Human existence is like a continual ping-ponging between abundance and lack; how could we not ache with yearning through much of our lives? And yet . . .
This tree, and this sky, and this moon, do not just promise but yield an abundance more rich than we could know to ask for.
This abundance is joy.
I’m not sure who arranged for there to be so luminous a thread through the darkest tangles of undergrowth in our lives.
Last weekend I go, for the second year, to the Village Harmony Winter Weekend on neighboring Lake Morey, where 80 or so people gather to sing traditional music from around the world—Corsican, South African, and gospel music are especially well-represented this year. I hadn’t planned on this experience entering the tree, as it were, since I wrote about it last year.
But now I can’t not. Because as I climb the tree tonight through the sleet and the dark a few hours after coming home, I am still vibrating. One of the lessons of the tree is that it (sometimes) gives us more than we can know to ask (as above). But other times the tree is what one brings to it, voluntarily or involuntarily, and tonight the branches are humming with reverberations of song, of creativity, passion, and community—of human connection, expected and unexpected, familiar and new, forged around the raising up of voices in harmony. It sounds like a cliche, or in fact a whole string of them, but it is very real, and I am literally vibrating with it all still, maybe cellularly. And this is one of the things the tree does: it is an echo chamber in which reverberations gather, strengthen, and become more audible. Like an immense tuning fork planted in the earth. And tonight they, and I, are singing.
The next night (there are so many nights) it is a changed tree yet again: ferocious, exhilarating, a maelstrom of energy. The winds have been howling all day, gusting to 50 mph. When I get home from work mid-day the snow has drifted knee-deep across the driveway. I have to leave the car at the bottom and walk up to call for a plow so we’ll be able to get up it when we all get home later.
Now it is late, and dark, and the wind is still roaring up the hillside. It has blown the branches bare of snow so the climbing is easy, but at the top it sucks the air out of my lungs as I breathe. Wood knocks and rattles around me and an especially powerful blast of air travels across a neighboring hillside like a freight train. I gulp air for a few minutes then climb down and head for the house.
This afternoon I met the girls and a friend at the Dartmouth Greenhouse where on school vacation, and waiting out the unplowed driveway, they had sought reprieve in the lush greenery from February in Vermont. I linger after they leave, crouching near a tiled tank where large koi slowly turn in the shadows beneath the lily pads. My face almost touches the water.
Yearning, passion, abundance.
So many nights.
