The Quiet, Faithful Life of a Tree

I’ve been quiet around here lately, and that doesn’t bother me like it might have a year or two ago. I don’t want to speak frivolously, but my purpose for this space and writing in it is not for those of you who read and want more. I covet your time and feel thankful for each strange twinge of human connection it’s fostered. Really, there’s something cosmic about the transfer of experience from being to being, having met or having never yet met. Reading someone’s mail, as it were, and letting it happen the other way. I think we need more of that brutal exchange, and I’ll offer myself up for the opportunity every time.

But if I wrote for you simply because you read and you liked it, this shit would be over. The muse becomes a different thing entirely. It’s no longer art, or rather the manifestation of art as Christ through me. It would look like long-suffering deadlines (the two of these by themselves breed faithfulness but don’t play healthily for me in conjunction), opinion as an idol, and filling inevitable spaces that I was never meant to fill. The minute I start owing anyone anything, I’ll owe everyone everything, and that’s not a white rabbit I’m willing to chase. I hope this makes sense.

Truthfully, it’s been a little of this and a little of that. I’ve had my nose in the dirt, forging ahead in some areas I’d have been too fearful to go for in a previous life. Doing over saying, which is a new concept for me and in some ways a better one. I’m riding the proverbial wave (after a good stint of toes in the sand) and in doing so have felt the kind of pruning that happens when you’re finally ready for it. Some, you know, we stumble into and some works itself out over time, but this kind doesn’t feel sharp as much as it feels like I’d imagine a freshwater rain would after several days lost at sea. Gathering the pails and buckets and empty sardine canisters because here it comes, boys, and please don’t miss it. Patience, open-handedness, a spirit of peace and a gentler one. Pruning that only stings because it would have been nice to have had it awhile ago and now you’re scared you’ve got to ration the miracle because will it stay? And if not, will it come again? I drink with my tongue out wide like my life depends on it and I apologize for the belated invitation.

The idealist in me, though, wonders about the real reason I haven’t written in three months – as if what I said before wasn’t excuse enough. Is it because sometime earlier this year I’d committed myself to put down the pen and to read? I’d make my tiny veins plump with wiser words laid out like a feast before me, ones that had done both the sowing and the reaping and all the preemptive becoming. I’d lay a blanket over mine so as not to collect much dust but to forget its whining for a time so that I might press in to the gleaning. And I’ve done that, some, but it wouldn’t have stopped me. I’d have snuck into my room and plucked the blanket aside, bludgeoning the page until I could breathe properly again. Writing is no discipline for me, although I could make it one. I listen to it and respond accordingly and usually against my will or better judgment.

. . .

I remember being younger, maybe fourteen, and being dubbed “Megaphone Mouth” by Dad. He’d say it sweetly and like he wouldn’t trade it, but the decibels in which I said regular words apparently translated to some ungodly and uncomfortable level for those in earshot. In high school, my health teacher let me hear it. I’m Mrs. Conscientious, never-miss-a-day, star pupil, but I couldn’t seem to figure out my volume. I snapped at her, because the entire class was in uproar, hissing and chattering, which she recognized. She shrugged and said, “Your voice is the one that stuck out louder than all the others.” I had crafted a masterful frequency that outran the rest, maybe due in part to a large family and one that shouted remarks in ladder-like fashion. To keep up meant crawling on someone else’s shoulders and beating on your chest in pride once you reached the top.

I’ve got a strong bent towards feeling unheard or misheard with a lot to say and no real way of getting it across, and perhaps this heightened my perception of “tell something worth telling or you ought not tell it at all.” Words were my gavel for many years. I could make them what I wanted and they would tell me how to feel. I hung my hat believing, in the language of Kim Addonizio, “there is something you absolutely need to say. No one is asking you to say it. You know that, and yet here you are, an army ready to do battle with the forces of silence.”

I respect that sentiment still to some degree. Voices of hope, or not even hope – just a voice of anything – in a hollow land. This land is hollow and I have a voice to use. I got real good at taking up my words as a shield, and they’re some of the times I regret most heavily. The Lord’s been kind in revealing to me moments that I’ve used words for senseless battle. He’s been kind in showing me that the forces of silence are often a gift and shouldn’t be fought. And he’s been kind in teaching me how to let the shield loose and wield a new thing, one that might not involve my words at all.

We were sitting around a BBQ joint the other night, most of my family and I. We stammered on over Shiner about the fish that the boys caught earlier. We got on to telling stories of growing up, building upon memories of when we’d laughed the hardest, comparing our separate scenarios with sleep paralysis, and uncovering the phenomenon of recurring dreams, ones we’d each had that were too hard to articulate at the time. The four of us there finally circled back around to birth order and marveled at how different we all are, me from my brother in the middle and even he from our brother that’s the youngest. In a few moments of tender discipline, we called to mind instances we had been hurt by each other and areas in which we were most skilled in hurting.

There will never be a time when that’s pleasant to hear, but I’m more inclined to hear it in the moment, when it’s a fresh, clean sweep up. There’s a scuffle and a flash and then it’s over until the next time. This one was miles worse and far more jarring because you’re at eye level with almost twenty years of your bloodiest battles, ones during which your words did all of the wounding and they’re still talking about how much it hurt. Not anymore, but maybe. Who knows.

I went home and cried in the shower for fifteen minutes. I scrubbed my skin raw and wondered how much damage does it take to equal a wasted life and at what point do you stop hurting people in the exact same way? I was thinking about my husband now.

He’s only been on the receiving end five years, and I’ve delivered to his door enough persecution for this life and two more. Manipulation, fabrication, domination. Shrinking behind plated armor when I have felt embarrassed or duped or misunderstood or unwanted. And as much as he recognizes the hurtful hiss and chatter of the rest of the class, I’m just so scared that he might one day say that your voice is the one that stuck out louder than all the others. And as I fumble my way out of the bathroom, soaking and sobbing and looking for a shirt, he’s there with a blow dryer. He sits me down in the hallway on our floral, hand-me-down chair and combs the tangles in my hair and says that the ones who have every right to run will still outlive the rest. That’s how it works when people love you, he said, and that if it’s not one stupid sin it’s another. We all know, and we’ve all stuck around, haven’t we. Don’t be so hard on yourself and say you’re sorry when you can.

. . .

I will always write, because I have to, much like the need to salivate or to swallow. It always comes when it needs to, but just as I’m thankful for the discipline of writing words, I’m equally so for the discipline of harnessing them. Making them not like a rope of possession or a whip of correction or a leash of control, but making them like a ribbon of comfort and truth and wisdom that brings healing [Proverbs 12:18].

Another writer years ago told me that I’d be doing a great disservice to the world by not exercising my gifting publicly. That it was more prideful and selfish to hold onto my words than to share them. I lived a long time after that thinking I’d better tell something worth telling. And I guess what I’m realizing now is that I could live a quiet and really faithful life without ever writing a word for you again, though that’s not my hope. I hope that you’re encouraged when you come here, but I pray you don’t depend on it. I pray you depend on muscling your way through your own junk sometime and that he’d wield a new thing in you, too.

I wanted to share a poem with you that I found. It’s about the quiet, faithful life of a tree who wouldn’t speak if given the choice. Let’s you and me care more about sinking our roots into the ground that grew us.

The Life of Trees by Dorianne Laux

The pines rub their great noise

Into the spangled dark, scratch

their itchy boughs against the house,

that moan’s mystery translates roughly

into drudgery of ownership: time

to drag the ladder from the shed,

climb onto the roof with a saw

between my teeth, cut

those suckers down. What’s reality

if not a long exhaustive cringe

from the blade, the teeth. I want to sleep

and dream the life of trees, beings

from the muted world who care

nothing for Money, Politics, Power,

Will or Right, who want little from the night

but a few dead stars going dim, a white owl

lifting from their limbs, who want only

to sink their roots into the wet ground

and terrify the worms or shake

their bleary heads like fashion models

or old hippies. If trees could speak,

they wouldn’t, only hum some low

green note, roll their pinecones

down the empty streets and blame it,

with a shrug, on the cold wind.

During the day they sleep inside

their furry bark, clouds shredding

like ancient lace above their crowns.

Sun. Rain. Snow. Wind. They fear

nothing but the Hurricane, and Fire,

that whipped bully who rises up

and becomes his own dead father.

In the storms the young ones

bend and bend and the old know

they may not make it, go down

with the power lines sparking,

broken at the trunk. They fling

their branches, forked sacrifice

to the beaten earth. They do not pray.

If they make a sound it’s eaten

by the wind. And though the stars

return they do not offer thanks, only

ooze a sticky sap from their roundish

concentric wounds, clap the water

from their needles, straighten their spines

and breathe, and breathe again.