Sounds between us.
When I asked how, she told me, too. To find the tree to hear its sound and the sound of shaded earth beside it. To find the water, sounding water. To notice the call and response between them and listen for your cue.
The volume of shadows.
Two trees, one real enough to be seen, another seen well enough to last the length of a dream. But neither can ever become real. This from Hannah Arendt, and now the alarm can’t wake me.
The sun is visible one moment and then less so in another but indicates nothing of sorrow or regret. It offers shadow. We see by the shadows. We measure them. Once, someone considered their lengths, prone to stretch and collapse, and asked, what do they mean? A decision was made. These mean Time.
Numbers were assigned to the lengths, etcetera, etcetera–– but some of us here, so often delayed as measured against a standard pace, retain some skepticism about these systems. Of their presumed inviolability, a separate matter from their usefulness.
Trees cast long shadows and are associated with knowledge and wisdom, and yet standard practice rejects the idea of arboreal sentience. In a world bent on speed, stillness so often gets mistaken for stupidity.
But only in stillness do certain questions show up. What is the length of the water on a face, bearing witness to the beginning or the end of a life? And the volume of this shadow of the solitary pilgrim on the long road in late afternoon?
I still don’t know. But speech is an act of making concessions. Consider the first lessons of any language not inherited. Standard practice begins with the basics for moving through a landscape: Hello. My name is. What time is it? It is an o’clock. How are you?
The last of these is the least amenable to explanatory language, wanting only touch and smell and song.
***
I came across Arendt’s words in an epigraph to Ann Lauterbach’s Spell. My italicized presentation in the opening lines is a paraphrase.
A video reading of this post appears here.
At the crossroads.
On the day of the dead, among this cloud of witnesses, someone here whispers, help me find it again, that joy I once had in looking. Instead of an answer, this space, and the hum of a motor nearby.
We love the old trees of our myths for the spaces they hold inside themselves, but also for the way they know to keep it around them, this cushion of shade made soft by the absence of another tree.
In the eruption of any given birth, a core could easily splinter, and yet here we are, faces dappled by the light and noise of becoming, learning to make room for what would breathe.
What if we gave it up, this whole habit of protecting these temporary husks?
I have an idea.
About what?
How to die.
Please. I’m trying to just––
No, it’s about that too, hear me out. Let’s not put these bodies in boxes when we’re done with them.
Ah, the boxes. What size, what wood, what level of cushioning? Where to put the box, and what shoes?
Let’s give it up, that whole thing.
You mean––?
The whole habit of protection, when it comes to these temporary husks.
From?
The inevitable ends we want to rage against. The humiliation of decay.
Not to mention of a bare face, unpainted.
Exactly. What were we doing with all of that, anyway?
What were we hoping to keep?
Look at the fate of cut flowers, gathered with the same impulse. I mean––
Any vase, however flimsy, will outlast its contents, destined in most cases to wind up broken.
Or on a Goodwill shelf with a sticker.
Let’s try something else. What if we burned as we lived, saving none?
Fuel for the living. What if––
we used the container we keep––
––for growing, instead?
With all the dirt, filth, worms––
Husks of fruit––
Let the falling seeds have at it.
If I’m going anyway, let me spend what I have on the living.
Here it is, take it. This hand.
Not to chain, but to comfort.
Yes, and this face. Not to photograph,
To hold a gaze. These eyes, even.
Don’t cover them with coins.
Eat this vision, I am giving it up.
Don’t strike me down.
Don’t box and bury me.
Let the fire eat my excess.
Let me prefer this and the way it reduces
––my body from its confines, to magnify
––Its purpose?
Infinitely. Then put me at the base of a tree.
Let me be dust. I am going now. Hold none of me.
In the spring, I will bloom for you, reminding you back.
To what?
To an original question: what is beauty without death?
To make it something we ache to be, hold; being held inside it, holding.
Wait. It comes for you also, but also coming is this impossible bloom.
A thousand bursts. Like cotton balls when you squint, in baby-blanket pink.
Rest against this trunk.
Of my shade. There will be nothing to hold
but there you will be, cool inside it.
Cool from burning?
Yes, you will be cooling from the burning
there, in the shade of my ash, for a little while.
And you will welcome me there?
Yes.
For how long?
How long will you stay? Don’t answer.
Why not?
Because when the time comes, you will burn it all up again.
But––
Still, I will be at the end of the burn and the beginning of this tree––this cooling shade, waiting.
Wait.
This post is inspired by an article I read this morning in My Modern Met (one of my go-to haunts for inspiration), about new environmentally friendly developments in burial rituals: vertical gravesites, human compost, and the option of burying ashes at the base of a new-planted tree.
