What The Trees Do

How getting outside helps you get inside!

Photo by Michael Krahn on Unsplash

Ever since I moved into the mountains and away from asphalt and concrete, something in me began to come back to life. As David Whyte, the poet tells us, “The Lazarus in me began to move” and I began to follow him. First, I felt a nudge—a sense that said, “What’s this I feel? Could it be my dormant heart rising up within me? Well—Hey there you, where have you been for so long?”

I think venue, location, geography and soil have so much to do with our well-being. Fierce landscapes and all of nature becomes a living parable to help us get out of our heads and into our hearts. Just like rain water in cities flows into gutters and drains, because there is no soil in which it’s moisture can offer it’s life-giving gift, we must return to the ground—to the soil—to the trees and Mountain Laurel to find a message that awaits us.

Perhaps, this is precisely why people have always gone into the mountains to escape the asphalt and find the green that awaits them—the life that is in these hills. We go to the beaches as well, where the sand meets the water and where our souls lose their footing in the ocean waves. You can go to a park and have the same experience.

But, I do think going outside is the pivotal key to help us go inside.

Summer is coming. Where will you go to make sense of it all?

I am sitting about thirty feet up and off the ground up in my glass treehouse. It’s actually a sun porch—and on the second floor (if you can picture it) attached to my house but it has the vibe and feel of a glass catherdral. Here, I am in the midst of it all. The Blue birds are still nesting. The Mountain Laurel is almost in full glory and display. The Red Bud has leafed out in prominence. The Pine Tree now has its slender candles on the tips of the branches. The Cedar trees now have a blue hue with their new growth. It is like starring at a stained glass window—but better because it is alive, not dead—human made glass chards.

And here, I am acutely aware of my inner landscape. All this looking. All this staring. All this space opens up my senses and opens up my soul. I listen and I hear. I see and I am seen. I ponder and I am in the Presence.

Prior to COVID, I read alot of books. But when COVID hit the world, my brain was somehow hit with a loopy feeling which said something like: “Quit taking in more and more into your head.” I think COVID, January 6th, George Floyd’s neck being knelt upon all was a sensory overload for my tender soul to take in. So, I stopped reading. Actually, I couldn’t read books. I could not take in any more words.

I moved away from social media—which has helped me greatly and knowing the election was growing near, decided to stop listening to the news. It was too, too upsetting and left me dumbfounded more than in the know. I have not yet returned to the news and at present have no intention to do so. I still feel “done.”

I am still making a weekly choice to help bring me back to life and that choice is to answer this one and single question: “What will bring me life?”

Books quit bringing me life, so I needed to do another kind of reading of sorts.

I think silence helped me. Choosing beauty first helped me and trees helped me. So, I began to walk among the trees and to sit there on a fallen oak or pine and that became a sort of church for me that brought me more sense than paper bound books could ever do.

Maybe it was or still is my Walt Whitman phrase or David Thoreau stage when he went to Walden’s Pond and I went to Brevard, NC. I’m not sure. But ,what I am sure of is that this greening of the mountains greened my soul and I felt the breath come back into my body and I felt alive again.

We are now weeks away from summer’s season in full fledge. Here’s my advice: Take some time to plan a trip to some where into wilderness. Make this your pilgrimage. And give yourself permission to walk barefooted in clover and wade in a mountain stream or sit idly by on the shore and watch the Peregrine and Pelican swoop and dive and be so happy when they emerge with a fish in their beak. You too, may feel that soul and body filling as they do.

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Here’s my poem this week. I am trying to write a new poem every seven days. I wrote this particular poem last week and have sat with it now, tweaking some words and erasing entire verses until today. It feels ready to be heard. It feels ready to be seen—just as the Mountain Laural blossom does. I imagine this blossom saying, “Steve, just give me one more day, then come back to see me. I’ll show you my glory then.”

And with this, my poem, “What the Trees Do” is saying to anyone who cares to accept my invitation and more importantly theirs—to give you their presense and Heaven’s Presence to assuage that deep, far off feeling most of us can confess from time to time, if we’re honest with ourselves.

There’s a movement in this poem which is important to me to note. The “far off” feeling and notion is something I am very aware of in how in the most odd kind of way, I can tell you is this. Trees have become my friends and to them I belong and I suppose I am more and more aware that one day, I will return to them—or my body will at least. You know “Dust to dust.”

It’s interesting to me that our church here as a Cemetary in the midst of the forest. You take a trail into the forest to reach this place of greening where slaves and masters are buried side by side—for it is an old place—a place where everything belongs and everyone belongs in one final place in the peace of the wild. I like this and Gwen and I talk often how this might become our final place. Why? Because going back into the concerete and asphalt simply does not bring me life.