September:  Oaks

In this haphazard manner Nature surely creates you a forest at last, though as if it were the last thing she were thinking of.  By seemingly feeble and stealthy steps--by a geologic pace--she gets over the greatest distances and accomplishes her greatest results. 

– Henry David Thoreau, “The Dispersion of Seeds”

The trees, they tell us, 

Send each other warnings,

Share their food, sacrifice for their young,

Are connected more than we imagined.

They are family.

Easy to miss, of course,

Their subtle scents, their silent semaphore,

Their hidden conduits.

How could we have known

They have so much to say?

In the silent seconds of

The stillness of winter

When their leaves are down,

When the mind is slow

I wonder about all that I’m missing.

What do your saplings see?

What most remarkable connections

Do they retain?

Do they dream in wordless worlds

of touch and smell.

What strange synaptic switch

Commands such clarity,

So one with light.

How could we not know

These time-bound beings,

Having seen so many generations,

Would be so wise.

And in those still, timeless times

I imagine something remarkable

Between you and your babes, 

Your sweet saplings:

The wisdom of the forest,

Of truest connections, of love,

And I wonder . . .

– RB

On most days, when figs are not in riotous exuberance, I like to sit on an old half rotten pine stump in a copse of oaks near the honey bees.  Though many hardwoods on this side of the continent, undisturbed by human hands, would live over 400 years, some much more, nothing in this copse was nearly so old.  Only a few might boast more than 100 years.  The various and too often gaping gullies that run through the farm are likely markers of the farming practice of the late 19th and early 20th century, perhaps the product of the abandonment of a farm plagued by weevils or overburdened by debt in the Depression or both.  Having been scraped to grow cotton and cows, there was nothing to keep the soil in place, and heavy rains carried too much of it down to the Oconee River.  Not far from the farm lie the remains of a community, delightfully named Skull Shoals, that thrived on barge traffic; the river would be hard pressed to support canoes in the summer now with so much farmland within its banks.

  When looking up the scaly bark to the aptly named crown, it is hard to imagine these oaks are but adolescents.   My dear dog, the Great Pyrenees that protects the farm from predation, is only five and in his prime.  His name is Oak (formally Quercus Alba) in hopes that he will have a long life, but he embodies other characteristics of his namesake: he is patient and solid, gentle and loving.  Oak’s lifespan is to my mine what my lifespan is to the woody oak, more or less.  Such insight makes me wonder how I might live if I knew I would live for 400 years.  

In the copse are two oaks that have grown up together with branches that crossed in such a way that they have grown round about each other.  At just the right angle, one can see a sliver of light between them, and when the wind is just right, one bows the other (which is bow and which string, I cannot tell), offering a rich addition to the forest symphony.  If the figs inspire a jig, the oaks are masters of the saraband, a waltz for the lives of Baucis and Philemon. 

Even as I consider these two trees, I think how foolish it is to see any of the copse as an individual, and understand anew the meaning of not seeing the forest for the trees.  The unseen roots are all about underfoot, and their partners, the ubiquitous fungi, collapse the distinction between tree and not-tree, muddling all categories of soil-bound taxonomy.  Periodically, the fungi will burst forth (inspired by a healthy day or two of rain) in delicious fruit, the bright orange chanterelles, a grace that, once sauteed, even further muddies the boundaries of individuals.  Once in me, the mushrooms often enliven my dreams in new and curious ways. 

Lingering with the stillness of the oak before me, my breath slows and deepens.  The morning air is suffused with the just-released oxygen from the trees above.  The sweetness of the elemental Hebrew creation story has it right:  mud and breath, as true for the oak as it is for me.  I inhale the breath of the copse and then exhale slowly, a kind of reciprocal recreation, a perfect conspiracy, giving back to the trees that which they need.

Life on the farm is abundant and most often joyous, though there is seldom a moment where something does not call for attention:  a rotten terrace, a downed fence, a wandering pup, seeds to plant, vegetables to harvest, weeds to pull. . .  all in season, all in season.  Yet looking up the trunk of the oak, I slowly, ever so slowly, realize that seeing generations of lives shorter than mine is infinitely easier than seeing those longer.  This very tree might have known my grandfather, a claim I cannot make.  I breath in again;  my thousands of unconscious repetitions could never align with the glacial pace of the breath of the tree.  How could I hope for a glimpse of the wisdom of this oak, my horizons so narrow, my time frames so brief?   It humbles.

In the stillness between breaths, I glimpse the shades of farmers who have lived on this land, the grandfathers of the soil I now work.  The Georgia piedmont in the 1920s was mostly worked by descendants of slaves, themselves caught in the slave-like trap of sharecropping.  They knew the land well, were good farmers though limited by wretched circumstances.  I see myself  behind a mule-pulled plow, see myself nailing barbed wire to hand split cedar posts, and ultimately see my crop ruined by weevils. How easy it is to condemn poor farming practices of previous generations.  How much harder to see a broke and broken man lose all that he had worked for.  The gullies mark so many generations of broken human lives, in need of as much redemption as the land itself.

In the stillness, I hear my slow breath and remember Merton’s contemplation of trees (I am quite sure the monk prayed under an oak):

 A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. . . . It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.

The epiphany is simple but keen: the tree embodies the essence of God; it is an arboreal incarnation.  Would we not do well to imitate the tree?  I reach down to touch the root-ladened ground.  No wonder we seem to know so little of God when we know so little of the manifestations of God before us.  "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe," the tree whispered.  Inspired by this tree, I have decided in earnest, when faced with decisions great or small, to ask what would the old oak do (WWOOD)?  

In truth, all about me are one with the oaks.   The squirrels and the deer are mostly acorns.  Thousands of communities of insects live in or on the oaks, many taking their meals from it as well.  A common, ancient, and widespread native of the continent, most everything has co-evolved to enjoy oaks in one way or another, not the least of which we Homo sapiens.  The oaks have learned over the millennia generosity and hospitality.

If it is hard to find the ends of the oak’s community outreach, it is exponentially harder to see the limits of the communion in the soil. The roots grasp the clay that was scraped of its earthy goodness not so long ago, but that ground improves each year as the oak drops a quarter million leaves, redeeming the soil and restoring its ability to hold the remarkable biodiversity that anchors the health of all who live about the forest.  Truly it is a slow salvation.  More than Father Abraham has God multiplied the seed of the oak as the stars of the heavens and the sands of the seas.  In that seed all the families of the farm and forest are blessed.  Even the rotting tree that has fallen across the creek is more alive than when it lived, with so many multitudes living in this gracious and life-giving death, in this hollowed home, gnawing the oak into soil and growing up in its crevices.  Would that I could be so generous in my death.

It seems to me that the life of the copse embodies the reconciliation and redemption of a beloved community.  In this place, the sins of our species, our destructive carelessness with each other and the natural community, are being redeemed, not by acts of humans (though I pray I at least do no harm) but by the gracious, generous, and steadfast hospitality of the trees.

I have walked the rocky ridges of the north Georgia mountains, on trails too steep to log, in search of the ancients of the forest and the wisdom they offer.  On the ridges, though, you find only battered, stubby, heavily burled trees, no giants at all.  Do they not also show, perhaps even more than the mighty oaks before me, the essence of God? Have they not transformed their suffering into a kind of steadfast generosity?  They display the truth of a long life lived, Job-like, in adversity.  

Indeed, how would I live if I knew I would live 400 years?  I pray that I might be as faithful, as generous, as hospitable as the trees.  The wind shifts and calls me out of my forest meditation, chilling my ears and hands, and the crossed oaks bow the deep lament of the opening Prelude to Bach's 5th Cello Suite.  The chill reminds me of the oak snag I have my eyes on to feed the fireplace in the coming winter.   What peculiar comfort the warmth of an oak fire holds.  Such seemingly profligate usage–years and years of faithful growth consumed in an evening--gives such indescribable pleasure, these old and cold hands reaching for the warmth, receiving something very like love.