I look to The Tree, an oak, multiple times a day. She draws my eyes to herself when I walk out to do chores or circle the dogs behind the chicken house on their walks. She marks the ground like a surveyor’s pin. She sits at the corner of three fields. I wonder if she’s the tree farmers used to focus on in order to plow straight rows before GPS automated straight lines. Or maybe she was left for shade when horses plowed these fields.
The Tree’s presence comforts me because she is so present. It’s not particularly huge. (We have a poplar tree that stands taller.) Her branches looked like the north wind pushed them to the south. There is a broken branch underneath her. Last summer, my heart sank when I noticed a patch of leaves had turned brown before it was time for leaves to shed.
Oak wilt is a common disease killing oaks in Northern Illinois. The Illinois Pest Management website says, “The oak wilt fungus invades the water conducting vessels of the sapwood through fresh wounds or by root grafts formed between diseased and healthy trees. In a few days, balloon-like tyloses and gums begin to plug the water conducting tissue, blocking the flow of water and nutrients from the roots to the foliage. As the supply of water becomes restricted, leaves wilt and die.”
Our home is surrounded by beautiful, strong oaks. Two have already died. Bruce smoothed over dirt where the first deceased oak stood. The wind caught another one and toppled it away from the house. Several are sickening. Even the Linden tree, brought here from Berlin in a woman’s boot, has some dying branches. Down the road there are trees barren of leaves and bark, that are dried up skeletons, done for. They look prehistoric from a time when strange creatures roamed the earth. Maybe something about their spirits hovering in the woodlot whispers a memory of creatures also dead and gone. A fierce windstorm knocked over two trees from inside the wood as if a giant hiding in the wind leaned his shoulder against them and shoved.
This fall I took a writing class with Paul Kingsnorth, a modern-day prophet, who warns us that western civilization is dead, that we are in danger of being absorbed by the machine. Our phones are ubiquitous and addicting. Many houses are smart. A friend of a friend’s house shut down when she lost internet connection, including her thermostat.
Kingsnorth said that light particles, photons, can shoot through something, say a tree and be changed as it comes into our eyes, so we are changed by our paying attention to the tree.
In his inaugural Substack, Iain McGilchrist says, “As you know, I believe that attention, the kind of attention we choose to pay, and indeed whether we attend at all, wholly alters what we discover in the world we come to know – which is of course all that any of us can know. Attention is, then, a creative (or destructive) act and therefore necessarily a moral act. Pure attention has been likened by Louis Lavelle and Simon Weil to love itself.”
Right here, right now, I’m interested in the attention we pay to plants. Zoe Schlanger notes in The Light Eaters that we are blind to the plants around us. She notes “…plants are much further from us evolutionarily, having evolved in a context so unlike our own. They make food out of light and grow rooted to one spot, spending decades or centuries probing their environments for sustenance. Their way of life is so alien as to often preclude them in our imagination from even having a way of life. This state unseeing has become a named affliction, lamented among botanists: ‘plant blindness,’ the tendency to view plant life as an indistinguishable mass, a green smudge, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion is from a trout” (34).
Kingsnorth was urging us to look, really look at the world around us, and be changed. I think about how Maggie Ross urges us to behold the world, give it attention. In the precis of her essay, Behold Not the Cloud of Experience, she says, “The word behold is a liminal word; it signals the threshold of contemplation, where the self-conscious mind stops analyzing and becomes attentively receptive, open in an ungrasping and self-emptying way to irruption from the deep mind.”
As you know I’ve been practicing this still prayer when I walk. Because I have mild cognitive impairment my mind will empty at times. Other times I voice my complaint. My happiness, my feeling good, tends to fall to quiet. These walks, beholding the fields, The Tree, the sound of my footsteps have begun to do what Maggie Ross says in Writing the Icon of the Heart, “Instead through beholding we are transfigured in every sense: nothing is wasted; nothing is left behind; through our wounds we are healed: our perspective—the way we ‘figure things out’—is changed. In the resurrection, the wounds of Christ do not disappear, they are glorified” (xxii).
During his talk Kingsnorth noted how he traveled to Papua New Guinea to research what the Indonesian government was doing to the indigenous peoples. When they came to an open spot and saw the forest going on for miles, the people sang. Later he asked what the song was about. They said they were thanking the forest for letting them walk through.
During the same weeks I studied with Kingsnorth, I also took Christian Wonder Tales with Martin Shaw which has re-opened my love for storytelling, something Bruce and I loved early in our marriage. His voice sounds like our barn if it could talk. It is steeped in years of studying mythology, steeped in knowing how to tell a story. He is a recent convert to Orthodoxy. I listen to his stories while doing chores on Sunday mornings. He says in Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass that “It appears you can perk up the mood of a place with a good story. And the fidelity has currency in the wild places. To keep showing up, not taking anything, just being sweet and straightforward with a place, it has an effect. I asked the woods this: How do you want me to love you? From then on, I followed that lead” (60).
Lately I’ve been coming to terms with how very alive and sentient the world is. In the Light Eaters Zoe Schlanger writes about how plants are maybe more intelligent than we ever dreamed. This is a paradigm that is disturbing botanists. She writes, “Glutamate and glycine, two of the most common neurotransmitters in animal brains, are present in plants also, and seem to be crucial to how thy pass information through their stems and leaves. They have been found to form, store, and access memories, sense incredibly subtle changes in their environment, and send highly sophisticated chemicals aloft on the air in response. They send signals to different body parts to coordinate defenses” (48). These discoveries take me straight to wonder and thinking about how God is intimately involved in creation.
Apparently scientists are discovering what St Paul says in the first chapter of Romans. Speaking about how every person is responsible for knowing God because of what’s evident in creation, he says, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom 1; 19 – 20, ESV).
In Isaiah’s terrifying vision, he hears the cherubim saying, “Holy, Holy, Holy, the earth is full of the glory of God” (Isa 6:3). And in Habbakuk the prophet says that one day the world would be full of the knowledge of the glory of God (Hab 2:14, NIV). That doesn’t mean the glory isn’t there, glory that might just be moving plants to have a kind of intelligence, we just don’t perceive it or in Maggie Ross’s word: Behold it. One day we will be full of this knowledge. What if we look for God’s glory, right here, right now in creation?
The Psalmist even says, “For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. (Psalm 33: 4 – 5, ESV). What if we turned our backs on the chaos. What if we started looking for that love in the natural world?
The early church fathers affirmed this in their writings. Elizabeth Theokritoff in Living In God’s Creation, cites St. Gregory Palamas, “God is in the universe and the universe in God, the one sustaining, the other being sustained by him. Thus all things participate in God’s sustaining energy, but not in his essence” (64.)
Theokritoff shows how St. Basil said it was useful to meditate on “the great wisdom in small things. A single plant…is sufficient to occupy all your intelligence in the contemplation of the skill that produced it” (49). She talks about his marvel at how different species of olives could produce different fruit. “Such intricacy in nature is, of course, by no means exclusive to believers, but Basil would go much further: the wisdom and skill seen in creation is inseparable from providential care” (50).
I’ve never failed to be gobsmacked by this embedded love, this glory when I’ve read in books like Some Assemby Required by Neil Shubin, An Immense World by Ed Yong and now The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger.
I was sitting here in my office, at this cluttered desk, when Kingsnorth said, “Go look at creation and imagine being that creature.” I walked out with the intention of imagining being Mrs. Horse, but I stopped at an oak that is dying.
Here’s what I wrote:
They came to bandage my wound, because I am dying, and I have become deaf, these amber plates lining the split, with the ugly human name fungi, fungus, mushrooms speak loudly because I have become deaf.
My wood has split open like the woman birthing a baby, screaming as she crumpled at my base, the baby pushing her way into the world before the midwife and the bed. The woman leaned her back against me when the men built the house and lead their Jersey cows and horses into the barn. The men saved me and a few of my brothers and sisters to make shade for the house.
The woman leaned her back against me when the men built the house, pegging timbers together, nailing lathe and stuffing horsehair between them. She came several times a day to rest and watch. Her prayers lifting into the air smelled like honeysuckle. Her belly grew large. I tried not to hit her with my acorns. She gathered them to feed their pigs.
She brought her baby, the woman’s face gray like dust when the wind picks up the fields and hurls them, before she climbed into the carriage, the horse draped in black, to bury the child.
Today a woman in jeans looks at me with sadness, a sigh. She wears a blue gray coat like clouds pushing blue sky off the table. She stands in the honest cold. She carries a notebook. But her fingers are too cold to write. She shines a light into my hollow where no light should shine.
My hollow swallows her light like a barren womb. Squirrels don’t live down here. The squirrels are quiet in the honest cold. I wish they’d come play, but I am too far for them to jump from the next tree over and back again.
The red fungal plates in my sides shout in my wood. She has just learned these plates tell me stories about the whole yard. About the elm by the barn, the linden by the house. I saw the Linden taken out of a boot and planted. The Linden said she came from the old country, the air there rancid with human fear.
My sisters aren’t well either. Brothers of the fungal plates sprout in the grass. White like priests. My roots ache to draw water to my branches, but they are slammed shut.
I know the woman more than she knows because other women have come to me, leaned against me. I have listened. She looks between me and the house. I know more than she knows.
She is measuring how I will fall when the hard wind roars, and the ache leaves, and I fall over, pulling my roots to their desire into the blessed air, into the sky and a chance to see the stars.
There’s a chainsaw in her eyes. I’ve heard the sound across the fields. My branches pray for wind to take us. There will be my last screaming cry, a cry she knows well from other trees she’s loved.
The decision she’s not made. The decision, her husband says there’s no need, the tree is too far to hurt the house.
But I hear the cracking, the one minute of flying through the air, the fall. My branches snapping, cracking as they lay down in the ground to sleep. My branches envied the roots, snug, chattering with my sister and the grass and the deer that trotted down the driveway and the cat who sits in front of the window waiting for the woman in jeans to set down his food bowl.
My roots envied the branches the sky, the fine skies that changed sometimes by the minute, sometimes by the day.
My roots envied them the stars and the bursts of green like fireworks widening to leaves, sometimes condensing to acorns. My branches drink air, blow out air and water.
I was here before the house was built. Men cut my sisters and brothers, slowly with hand saws, slow cuts with axes. My siblings yelped with pain. Over and over again.
But they were stood up in the barn, laid down across the air, covered by a roof. The weight of hay making them strong through the years.
Even though they are dead, they still live in the barn. Sometimes I hear them whisper.
But I feel the blue gray woman’s sadness in the honest cold. She has made love to a tree, an iron wood. She doesn’t know I know this but when a woman touches a tree, the tree knows. I smell her love for me in the honest cold.
She measures between us, the house and me.
My brother and sister have already fallen in her time. The wind pushing them away from the house. They were taken to be burned.
Already I am leaving my pulp. Already I am stepping aside. I told her. She captured my spirit slowly stepping aside, stepping towards heaven when she held up her light, threw a net over me, held me in that tiny screen, caught my ghost, that is stepping away, to another place.
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