There was this tree…
A few weeks ago I attended a wedding near San Juan Capistrano. The city is the birthplace of Orange County and holds one of the 21 Spanish Catholic missionaries built in the late 1700s and early 1800s. An artful part of town is Los Rios street, which is the oldest continually occupied neighborhood in the state of California. Here I encountered the above giant California Pepper tree sporting a sign “Old Mr. Tree Circa 1800.”
As I admired it in my usual way of thrusting an iPhone camera at every angle, a woman in her late 70s approached me. She’s been walking these streets for 30 years, passing Old Mr. Tree every day.
“See that hole? That one is new, and this part,” she points to a smaller hole, “it’s mending there. The tree heals and reopens, and heals.”
I asked how long it takes to heal one hole and she shrugged, “a few years,” and added casually that she, herself, no longer takes medicine. “My body knows how to heal itself… but only if I’m careful.”
I was taken aback and so impressed at her resolve, I tried to high-five her, and then instead resorted to a COVID-era elbow touch, which prompted our semi-awkward goodbye.
I wondered later if we are ever fully healed or, like Old Mr. Tree Circa 1800, if we have holes that we are continually tending to throughout every phase of life. Perhaps trying to rush, fuss over, or intellectualize said “wounding,” be it emotional or physical, disrupts the healing process instead of speeding it up. I’m reading a journal of artist and sculptor Ann Truitt, called Daybook, and she notes, “Perhaps the human lesson is always submission.” This is not to say that we are then always “broken,” just that it is human to have at least one current area getting lit up with a bit more sensitivity.
It is a reminder that most people are in a relationship with some type of healing and on an individual level this plays out in complex ways, yet we are united in the undertone themes of acceptance and careful tending to our “holes” both of which take time. This collective experience is more obvious during overt trying years, ahem pandemic, yet most likely always true.
How might we accept our own emotional or physical disruptions with more ease if we remember that it is ongoing to the human experience? How might we extend more compassion to others' dealings if we knew- even when it looks different on paper - that we are or have experienced the same pattern of healing, re-opening, and healing?
One way that helps me uncover or face sensitivities is through some act of expression/creation and maybe it is helpful to you too so here’s your reminder to set time aside to do or try that thing and here is a poem I worked on this week.
Hi, it’s me, your heart. You feel me before you share on a video call or when you get home from a walk and remove layers. You find me when you try to fall asleep and sink low into your watery belly. Listen you hear me more, congrats bravo, but now again please before you take the next pebble and build a road with your mind. There is no magic in rushing. It is here. Check in. Let the world's honey pour down into your head into your lips lungs liver over your tight hips knobby knees loosen your calves let their muscles relax ankles crack breathe blood to your toes. Let your eyes see everything. The yellows of a mug like a fresh picked lemon. Let your ears hear the creak of the house stretching into other dimensions. There are tidbits in this clear quiet static. Wait now until you are a particle, a cell of the whole, expanding and contracting, all floating in a divine plan.