I walk the neighborhood tonight searching for the moon. It’s there but cannot be seen in a new moon phase. In its absence are bright dots I believe to be either Venus or Mars. Left in its void, I think about how the nature of all things is to come and go… even the moon.
At the end of Minnehaha Circle stands a sycamore under the mustard glow of a street lamp. I stopped to study its features: flaking bark, camouflage trunk, smooth almond skin, yellowing broad maple-like leaves with some brown seed balls hanging off bare branches. Beside it, squats a bottle brush tree bearing no red bristles. But hanging at the tip of its lowest branch is an empty hummingbird feeder.
In today’s timed writing practice, I listed all the trees that I could name: live oak, pin oak, norfolk pine, sycamore, southern magnolia, bottlebrush, poplar, japanese maple, japanese magnolia, dogwood, sakura, loblolly pine, ponderosa pine, cabbage palm, bald cypress, birch, crape myrtle, juniper, cottonwood, maple, ginko, aspen, fir, banyan, bodhi, elm, crabapple, redwood and weeping willow.
Somehow, in writing and reciting their names, I felt as if I was recounting my own bloodline. Thich Nhat Hahn teaches that in our former lives we were trees. By studying and naming them, we give reverence to these great beings. The lineage of every living being is completely rooted in the existence of trees. They stand and surround us… forming a sangha for us to practice the dharma at all times. They breathe out for us to breathe in. Whether we see the forest from the trees, we can learn many lessons from their being… from our interbeing.
On the cover of Thay’s book, “Being Peace,” two gold aspen leaves touch; their stems flowing toward the word peace. In the book, he provides an example of how trees teach us interbeing.
“Leaves are usually looked upon as the children of the tree. Yes, they are children of the tree, born from the tree, but they are also mothers of the tree. The leaves combine raw sap, water and minerals, with sunshine and gas, and convert it into variegated sap that can nourish the tree. In this way, the leaves become the mother of the tree… The leaves are linked to the tree by a stem. The stem is very important.”
We are incredibly linked. This is the message from the sycamore. As I sit in meditation, I see the sycamore. As I write, my eyes trace the veins of my hand and I see its branches. My feet is supported by the same ground storing its roots… we are sisters. I think about Thay’s message of how the stem is important… our link… our connection… our interbeing.
I think about my sister. Even through our estrangement, the link remains. Last fall, the two of us shared a loveseat. I listened while she put aside three years of silence to tell me stories of how our mother never measured up… of how a connection was never formed between the two of them… of how much sadness and suffering she has had to endure. I listened to her explain, more to herself than to me, that birthorder delivered a relationship between my parents and me (the baby). But she never could get there with them.
We’ve held hands and clenched kleenexes through two funerals since then. Each encounter erased the jagged edges of us being torn apart by our own judgements of one another.
I sit with the sycamore’s message. I visualize picking small pieces of brown, gray and yellow bark along with a sycamore seed and leaf and placing them into a large manila envelope… tonight’s meditation is sealed within. I send it to her from my heart.
I want to say, “Sissy, you may not feel the connection… but it is there. Just as we cannot see the moon when it does not reflect the sun, we know that it is there. We are linked. The stem is important. You, like a leaf of a tree, are the child of mother earth and father sky.”
About a year ago, I traveled to Charleston to attend Natalie Goldberg’s writing workshop on memoir. I penned a poem entitled, “A Stripped Sycamore” during the trip.
A Stripped Sycamore
A January jaunt
A memoir to jot
Gangling loblolly pines
Form pickets to an imperfect fence
Framing an elusive childhood
Guarded by the horizon of a history gathered
Mental baskets unwoven
From waves of cord grass
Bent deep in concentration
Stillness swallows the swamp in winter
Chicora carries a recall on life
A slow garden stroll
Stirs contemplation in the camellias
As tea olives sweeten the afternoon mist
At the streets of North Market and Meeting
A fiddler adds rhythm to the rush
Pen kisses paper
Inking a hush
In the glance of stain glass
A bright existence winks
A Meyer lemon, glowing with intention
Falls softly to the hanging fog
The sudden heart bursts
Bleeding color into the gray gap of time
A stripped Sycamore
Dashed by naked truths
Stands alone
Who will mourn its timber?
At the time, I did not know the root meaning of this poem. It was not until I came across a passage in Anne Lamott’s book, “Bird by Bird,” that I connected to my own poetry…”an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, who God loves unconditionally anyway.”
“Ahh… the sycamore is Sissy,” I sighed to myself. I thought about my sister’s loneliness and suffering. I thought about how she could choose to forgive an imperfect childhood to stand rooted, drawing strength, from her own personal truths. And if she continued along this angry alienated path, I worried and wondered about who would be there for her.
Anne Lamott also says, “Forgiveness is giving up all hopes of having had a better past… I do not understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”
I spoke to my sister last week. She informed me of how stressed she is with work and how her boss is unbearable. She had made the decision to quit to create the space for new opportunities. Every morning she has prayed for the strength to endure each work day. One morning she prayed for her boss as well. I listened to her last week just as I had listened to her last fall.
Tonight, I send her my meditation and my heart… forgiving our past and feeling our present connection. I trust the sycamore’s wisdom. I see myself as one of its leaves… fluttering off a branch… completely trusting that I will land with new possibilities and pathways to my own heart.
I pray that my sister chooses the path of forgiveness. Then, perhaps, we can be two gold aspen leaves touching, flowing to peace… forever connected.
