Welcome to my newest readers!
Two weeks ago I was thinking I would share more about my research and book stack for the book proposal I’m polishing, but a few wandering discourses have intervened as school began this week. . .
Twenty mature trees shed. A lot. All year long.
Any time it rains or doesn’t, in days of high winds or none at all, our trees drop little branches and cones and other seeds. Pines, oaks, dogwoods, hickories, and the almost sinister black walnut I’ve written about before.
My husband and I don’t mind the chore. It’s not a price to pay for us. After decades of planting and babying new trees at every house we’ve owned, we fully enjoy the park-like setting that surrounds our 1898 farmhouse. Deep shade, dappled light, greens and browns, blossoms and nuts—all of these add to their beauties.
In late July, I was weeding my flower garden in the afternoon shade by our kitchen. Our tuxedo cat Pippin wandered nearby when we both heard a prolonged crack. At the sudden sound, he ran to the porch door. I stared at the sky. No ominous clouds. Bright sun.
I looked across the street. Like me, two of our neighbors stood still, looking about. A second crack shot out. Next door, oak branches near the top of a mature tree rustled and waved frantically as if a huge hand were shaking them. A final crack sounded, and a sizable live limb crashed into the yard.
Nothing was damaged and no one was hurt. The tree simply shed. On a bright, still summer day, it was a shock. It happened in seconds.
Maybe God designed it that way. “Let the disease go,” the oak said. “Forget the blight.”
I walked over to look at the twenty- foot-long branch. Though it looked normal on the outside, it had rotted in the middle. The rotted core was only the width of a dime, yet it was time to let go.
As my new school year begins this week, it feels like a new year complete with resolutions. Having walked through so many of these beginnings, I’m not exactly unrealistic. Experience and planning will never yield perfection, whether in August or January. We can’t let the past linger. We have to shed, be pruned.
Paul says it simply, “ . . . forgetting what is behind me and straining forward toward what lies ahead. I keep pursuing the goal in order to win the prize offered by God’s upward calling in the Messiah.”
As seasons change, what do we let go of in our own lives? How do we let go? Is there something naturally being pruned away?
Comment below or feel free to email me. And don't forget that the List Library at my website is always available to you, my readers.
Christine
P.S. Wendell Berry was my filling read this past Sunday, like poetry I fed on, though I really don’t know quite what word to use.
The Sycamore
from The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.