Friday, October 06, 2006

treehugger? me?

excerpt from Wish You Were Over There, a work in progress:


...In all the walks I’d taken there before, I’d never run into anyone else, which was part of the magic the place held for me, how when I was walking the woods were mine, there just for me. I rarely even ran across a fresh footprint, adding to the illusion that these woods were known only to me, three or four acres of unspoiled young forest just behind an enormous, modern medical facility with its brick and polarized glass.
When I was down the slope and out of sight of the hospital, I hunkered down beside a fair sized oak and put my arm around it. The trunk was about a foot and a half in circumference, the top swaying a bit in the fine breeze of the day. I rested my head against it, and turned a little so that I could wrap my other arm around and join my fingers on the other side. I closed my eyes and could feel, and hear, the top gently swaying with the wind, branches rubbing with its neighbors. I stood and faced the oak, my sneakers buried in late-fall leaves, my body pressed full-length along the trunk, my arms taking up more strain and my forehead dropping down until it touched the bark.
"Oh, Gaea, oh my Mother," I whispered as I felt the strength of the tree, swaying ever so slightly with it as the wind moved the top branches and that movement came down into the trunk more as small vibration rather than motion. I began to feel as if I was being hugged back as I hung on, making small whispering sounds, and knew that I had to let go soon, that the feeling was too intense, too sudden for me to be able to handle right then. I released my grip and once again hunkered down, still leaning against the trunk and feeling a bit out of breath. There was a secret here, I knew that, a secret that I could call up anytime that I wanted to remember those times when I’d been intimately connected to all that surrounded me. And there had been so many times like that, depression forgotten and me and the universe sharing secrets that I was certain everyone else must know but were for some reason not talking about. This sort of paranoia was always the beginning of my psychosis when approaching hyper-mania. What I felt this time was a profound, peaceful serenity, a fleeting glimpse of the sanity behind all the insanity of previous psychotic interludes. I had felt, while holding on to that wonderful, strong connection with the Earth, some primordial truth, some gift that I could carry with me when I reentered the concrete and brick world where my son struggled and talked through his own darkness. A gift that I might share with him, and with my daughters.
I walked away from that tall, strong tree, feeling satisfied and ready to face whatever the day brought. Carrying my truth, as I had so many times before, knowing I could never find the words to describe it, but knowing that that didn’t matter. It had never mattered. Truth is truth, and those who know it, and feel its power, can never help but share it. How this sharing is accomplished is never a primary consideration. Happiness, that free benefit of truth, radiates with a will of its own. I’ve forgotten, so very many times, that nothing is mine unless I give it away. The tree, the power and the connection of that tree to the universe, told me that. And, if and when necessary, the tree will tell me again.

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