I drive home and there is a crew with a cherry picker and a chain saw cutting down the neighbor’s tall tree, the one that shields my bedroom window from the streetlight, and the shiny leaves on the half they haven’t cut yet are calling to me, “Help!” I remember that the night before when I walked the dogs I noticed something about that tree in particular and felt blessed that it was there and grateful to it, and now I wish I had stopped and thanked it and asked myself why I had felt that particular something toward that tree at that moment, but I didn’t, and now they’re cutting it down. I go to my studio and burn some sage and cry some more and quickly tell the tree to send its remaining life force into its roots, into the ground, quick as it can. I apologize that it is being destroyed, that it wasn’t warned. I tell it I love it and am grateful to it, and so sad, and the doorbell rings and it’s G. with fabric samples for new pillows on the bench along my dining room table, and the seamstress is coming and I am totally disoriented and not at all in the mood to talk about pillows. I come red-eyed to answer the door and tell her about the tree, the chain saw is still going in the background and we are shouting over it, and right away she tells me two tree cutting stories: The young couple that moved in next door to her cut down the huge old persimmon tree full of persimmons, then the old plum and peach trees as well.
The seamstress arrives and G. says, “Fran here has a tree-cutting story”. And indeed she has, about a tree at her apartment almost as big as the Moreton Bay Fig tree. (A Santa Barbara landmark, planted in 1877, and officially designated as a historic landmark in 1970. It is believed to be the largest of its kind in the United States with a branch spread of more than167 feet, a total height of more than 76 feet and a trunk diameter above the buttress roots of nearly 13 feet.) Fran tells us, “The landlord cut the fig tree as soon as his wife died. She wasn’t there anymore to protect it. It took them a whole week to cut through the thick trunk and get that tree down. It is true that the tree blocked a lot of light and dropped a lot of leaves and nothing grew underneath it, but still…”
My boyfriend arrives and tells me his neighbors have cut down the huge Eucalyptus between their yards because a giant branch is leaning on their electrical wires and into his yard. That night a flock of birds flew around and around, circling and circling, trying to find the tree they had slept in.
I speak with a friend who is writing her story of being fetched in her dreams to become a healer. I am writing about how everything that seems so wildly separate is in fact connected back through time. I am writing about ancestors. Another friend describes how the Wholly Law is written in her body and her life is to live it so that it can be seen. Our friend and teacher, Deena Metzger, is surely chuckling because this is the lived Hypertext she has been coaxing us into and we must write it, we are writing it, as we live it.1
So much of human expression about loving a place is about the human-to-land love. This is outlandish enough for some, but it, too, misses the point. Isn’t it possible that the relationship can be mutual, that the land can and does love us back, and the trees and the ancestors and the spirits, too…? Isn’t it obvious? Ungrateful as we are, the land and the Mystery continue to show us how to love.
1 For information on Deena’s writing, blog, and teaching schedule go to www.deenametzger.net.
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