trees

I, like many others I assume, would like to believe that trees are mythical beings, with names, with characters, with voices whispering unspoken languages in the wind.

That when you see a tree branched out, with wooden knots and gangly arms, reaching up to the sky or curling under the dirt, there is some kind of divinity to the whole thing.

If there is a divinity in anything, it must be in trees.

I saw many trees in my very short recent jaunt through Northwestern forests.

And all of them seemed beautiful, unique -- some grimacing and spiky with spiraling blades for branches, and some just tied up with knots, as if their trucks had oozed in one direction before changing their minds and going another way.

When you touch them, or when I did at least, I expected a kind of spark, like those moments in movies where everything goes white and there's a flashback epiphany waiting on the other end.

But still, despite those many romantic images of trees imparting their secrets to us, of their long-lived existences unfurling wisdom around us, I have yet to commune with the soul of a tree.

It seems very fun, and very poetic, and I would like to close my eyes sometime and find out that yes, you can listen to the wind and all that, and there is some message we have not yet heard in all our walking lives drifting down from falling leaves.

But, and there must be a but here, because this is the point at which I tell myself, and everyone, that the world doesn't work like that, and no, you can't talk to trees.

I'm not sure I'm ready to make that leap just yet.

I like trees, and I like, better yet, metaphysical interpretations of things otherwise explicable through rational thought.

On a related note, I am contemplating focusing all my remaining career ambitions on becoming a wild wandering witch (very lovely phrasing) and figuring out how to harness the elements and the darkness and all that to tell fortunes of the peasant folk on the not-quite moors of the Midwest.

I really should have been an Emily Bronte novel.

Or a tree.

true things

The more I write, the less I find myself writing true things. It should be the other way around -- that experience and practice of craft makes honesty flow more easily, and provides an varnished surface on which to place the singular moments brightening an otherwise murky reality.

But it doesn't seem to work that way.

When I write, the less I feel the terror of exposure, because it is something I do all the time. And more often than not, it turns out relatively well -- or at least not awful.

And that adequacy just engenders within me a sense of empowerment, but also apathy, because today offers no real exceptional reason to do my utmost, to prove that I am better than mediocre treatises on what I did yesterday.

I think this is to some degree -- or perhaps exactly -- how I, and I suspect most of us, live our lives. Without the assurance that I got through yesterday reasonably well, or at least survived it, I would likely find myself in perpetual anguish, like the tottering teen literally doing everything for the first time, and therefore pulling all my limited willpower into getting up that next day.

Oh god, that explains so much.

But I am always surprised when I can somehow pull out of me something good, something worth reading. And usually more surprised that on those exceptional occasions, I am writing something true.