There are Mysteries
We Are Hesitant to Acknowledge
We do the familiar to avoid the mysteries. We establish routine to create predictability. We celebrate routine to assure safety. And then there was the day I set aside to honor trees. I sat with oaks and maples, birches and spruce. I went into the forest and watched flickering light and the sound of rustling leaves.
At the end of the day, I carried a chair down to the start of the driveway. Sat beneath my ash tree to commune with it. To sit in its light and shadow and lament the disaster that was coming to the species. A disaster that was moving east. A disaster that had made it as far as Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. There was even evidence of its arrival in Vermont and New Hampshire. All indications were that it had not yet made it to Maine. We had strict firewood transport restrictions.
I’d been sitting in the chair for an hour, thinking about this ash tree that my mailbox was attached to. I was reveling in the deep, rich woven bark of the tree, when two neighborhood women walked up the road, stopped, asked me what I was doing. I explained that I had taken the day to sit with trees and this ash tree was my final tree of the day.
I may have mentioned something about this being the last years of this tree. One of the women said she and a friend had been hiking the day before in the western mountains of Maine. She and her friend had found brilliant green beetles on an ash tree there. She said she suspected it to be the Emerald Ash Borer and called the Maine State Forestry Division to report her observation.
Coincidence, yes! Are there deeper meanings? Is there a type of knowing that threads its way through life that we often choose to ignore at any cost? For all of us, things and situations that we might call coincidence are happening often —smoldering at the edges of life and consciousness. What might it mean? Are we all connected at some deeper level?
What brought me to tree day was a new bracelet we were offering that had a bark-like finish. I wanted to spend time with trees and bushes to see if the finish could be identified.
Part of what surprised me was the richness of ash bark: the ridges and valleys, the deep woven patterns. In the previous 25 years, I’d walked and driven past this tree over 30,000 times collecting mail and newspapers, and I had not ever really looked at the tree. Ash trees are the last to leaf out and the first to lose their leaves in the fall. The idea that a little green bug, smaller the a dime could burrow beneath the bark of this four-story tree and strip off the bark and kill this majestic tree seemed so sad.
My day of tree sitting and communing with the trees showed me that I had not matched the bark to our new Bark Bracelet, but then, I’d only studied five trees on that one day of sitting.
Yes. True bark texture. Three high white diamonds surround equaling .15 carat total weight. Simple. Svelte. Your choice of three colors of gold: yellow, white, pink.
