Life and Death
In the yard next door sit two enormous pines. Their tips are something like 80 feet up. Unlike many of the giants that surround our place, I haven’t known how to relate with these two.
Early in our stay here, I greeted the other trees, quite literally, nearly every day. Hard to explain it; they all just seemed so awake and alive. They brought out my inner St. Francis. I even tried naming some of them, though that didn’t last; naming such enormous, elegant, aged beings pretty quickly felt wrong – too presumptuous, or controlling somehow. The few times I used names, the response I felt from the trees made me think of God telling Moses, “I am who I am,” rather than anything more specific. Names are wonderful things, but can also be limiting, constrictive.
In any case, I’ve moved in my relationship with these others into a mellower, more familiar coexistence, where I don’t say hello, but feel with them a simple understanding. As though our hats are always tipped to one another even when we aren’t externally doing so.
But these two, these two that sit directly opposite my office window: I’ve not known how to be with them.
For one thing, they only sit a foot apart. I suppose it’s only respectful of any pair that close to leave them well enough alone. Their arms and legs are tangled together, and though I can’t confirm it, near the bottom I’m sure their trunks are touching. Such intimacy seems really like a private thing.
But that’s not all that gives me pause with this pair.
One of them is nearly dead. Its partner is full of lush, green fur from top to bottom. But this one is nearly naked. Nearly dead. Greeting such an oddly intimate, dead-alive pair, just, well…hasn’t ever worked for me. I’ve just glanced at them occasionally from a distance, puzzled, silent, giving them their space.
This morning as I gazed from my window, though, they inspired a different thought.
For a couple of weeks, now, my inner world has been a tango between strong, capable, adult-Kristin, and a far younger version of myself. A Kristin that’s afraid of the things my child-self was afraid of, and that copes with fears the ways that child coped. I shake my head sometimes at what disparity exists between these two, and how strange it is that they both can live so fully and powerfully within myself.
As I looked at those trees this morning, I thought of these parts of myself, and the ways all of us develop means of coping in the world. Beginning in childhood, we establish habits of thinking about ourselves, ways of interacting with people we like and don’t like, patterns for dealing with (or trying to avoid) conflict or the things of which we’re afraid. Our habits serve necessary purposes, and are grown in the first place to help us survive.
But often there come times when one of these habits, or even quite a few, begins acting less like a lush, green tree, taking in waste and turning it into life-sustaining “oxygen,” and instead turns into dead weight. A coping mechanism backfiring. A means of self-protection that actually does us harm. Not everyone of such and such description is untrustworthy, for example. Or not every conflict is a bad thing. Or not everyone really wants to hear us talk for hours at a time…or, conversely, not at all. Sometimes the very relationships or thoughts or actions we most need to cultivate can’t be done without a certain type of dying. A dying of old habits that once lived well and served good purposes. A dying of that which overshadows all the “light” and “rain” and “sun” we really need to thrive.
I look at that pair this afternoon, and see in it a reflection of myself and those around me, living and dying at the same time, carrying within ourselves a complex entanglement of things flourishing and things wasting away. I’m warmed by this marriage, glad for the ways that death itself can be evidence of a more significant thriving.
Today I nod new greetings to that pair across the way, discovering in them not puzzling, awkward strangers anymore, but friends. Regally, unabashedly, hopefully, they show me who I am.