When a tree falls

it's about the tree and it's about more than the tree

buried without even a song.

There is something about a tree dying that brings all of the death and destruction in the world to your doorstep.

All of the pain and death in this wide world caused by injustice often feels incomprehensible to me, like I just can’t begin to grasp it.

But when my front hackberry succumbed to the violence of the wind, it was like all of the feelings for the brokenness of the world funneled through that crack. A portal of sorts.

the portal.

Maybe it’s because I feel like trees shouldn’t be able to die. Like children, and birds, and the people we love the most. Some things should be off limits.

the hackberry in spring, just beginning to bloom.

Actually, I never knew it was a hackberry until the arborist came to assess the damage. I just knew it as our tree. It’s interesting to know something so intimately but not know its name. We knew the hackberry’s energy. The way its canopy made dancing shadows in our living room.

When someone or something dies, their loss reveals itself in strange ways. The handle on my front door gets so hot from the sun now, I can barely touch it. I never knew the many ways the hackberry shielded us.

branches falling.

barren.

Mary Oliver

Over the past few weeks, I have wondered if I’m being dramatic about the tree. But I don’t think I am.

It’s about the tree and it’s about more than the tree and it’s about the tree.

There are so many things we can’t control, and my tree’s violent end made me so sad and angry about everything happening in the world.

I asked the guy who cut my hackberry down if he thought it could feel.

He was adamant that it couldn’t, but he told me that trees can heal themselves.

But I know the truth is that trees can feel (like why would they emit healing energy if they can’t feel? THINK ABOUT IT, GUY). Maybe not in the exact way we do, but something so alive, something that communicates with other trees and with fungus and that emits healing energy when it's cut, has to feel. Unfortunately, I Googled it.

I’ll leave you with more Mary Oliver.

Consider the other kingdoms. The

trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding

titles: oak, aspen, willow.

Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north

have dozens of words to describe its

different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their

thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their

infallible sense of what their lives

are meant to be. Thus the world

grows rich, grows wild, and you too,

grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too

were born to be.