Trees and Feathers

"Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity--which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem." --Eckhart Tolle


Dan was out of town all of last week, so I traveled to Helena with Felix to stay with the moms, AKA Grandma and Jannie. It was comforting to be with them, as that day I had taken yet another pregnancy test that turned up negative. Weighing heavily inside me was the knowledge that two other couples in Bozeman had just suffered the loss of their babies this summer, both of them during birth. Then, when I checked my e-mail, I learned that a friend and bright spirit in this town, Liz Ann Kudrna, was hit by a boulder while climbing and had her spine severed. In the span of a few seconds, she was rendered a paraplegic.

On a day when the moms took Felix into town and the carousel to give me some personal time, I dragged myself out of the house to take a walk in the forest. At first all I could see were the dead and dying lodgepole pines: every branch and needle brown and lifeless, the trunks riddled with round beige circles of sap like bullet holes, where the trees desperately tried to fend off attack by bark beetles. Jan and Mary Anne had 50 dead or dying trees cut down and hauled away to be burned. They are lucky in that they have lots of aspen, Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir in addition to the poor lodgepoles: some people, they say, lost every tree on their property.

I forced myself to see the bigger picture on my walk. I saw bear scat, a few days old maybe, full of seeds, not too big but I talked loudly to Genki and clapped my hands just in case. I was bushwhacking through a berry patch I hoped harbored no hungry territorial ones.

I searched for a weathered piece of tree trunk or branch I could take home for our garden as a memento of this lovely place. The moms will sell it in 2 or 3 years. The work of upkeep, shovelling, de-icing and negotiating a treacherous winter driveway, snow-blowing the 1/3 of a mile of drive to the road, keeping the grass cut, stacking firewood, monitoring propane and sewer and plumbing issues, and now spending a lot of money to remove the ecological and fire hazard of diseased trees, is wearing on them.

As I bushwhacked toward the lodgepole stands in the foothills leading to MacDonald Pass, I emerged to find all kinds of seeds stuck to my light fleece sweater. Sesame-shaped brown seeds, oval bright-green burrs, fennel-like dark slivers. When I got to the house and took off my shoes, I found black burrs like tiny twigs in my socks. Tenacious sparks of life, renewing themselves by grasping at any possibility.

Thoughts of life and death floated in fragments through my mind. I had already sobbed my eyes out in the house on my way out for the walk. Now I was drifting, going with the flow and watching Genki sniff around, trot back and forth to check on me, both of us listening to the aspens whisper, the evergreens sough, the bees thrum.

At the end of my walk I found my treasure, right behind the wood shop: a star-shaped bit of weathered Douglas fir root. It was part of a once-enormous being that was now a pile of weathered stump and branches aging into soil for decades, after a fire burned it down in the 1930s. The earth had claimed more than half of it, and no doubt dozens of spiders and insects and soil bacteria were now calling it home.

While writing this, my eye just landed on the peacock feather Felix brought me this morning. Purple, caramel, iridescent lime green and indigo and midnight blue eye: "Let it teach you how to live and die, and now not to make living and dying into a problem."