Blog #4

I've been thinking a lot about dependency, recently.  There are so many social stigmas around the subject that it's hard to sift through them all.  Our culture tells us that you should marry in your life, become "one" with someone else, but then criticizes a loss of independence.  Yet, it also criticizes being too independent, withdrawn from the world, from people.  Too much is bad, too little is bad, but whatever that too much or too little is, it doesn't seem to be left up to us to decide.

When I went to the pond yesterday evening, this subject was on my mind.  In nature, I think there is absolutely an indication of dependency.  Plants and trees are reliant upon the sun, on water, on soil.  Flowers rely on insects for pollination. Insects rely on plants for food. Animals rely on their mothers or parents, on a community, on the earth to give way to a home. I passed by a tree that was smiling at me, and noted that the holes were probably from a woodpecker, another instance of reliance: they need trees for shelter or nourishment. It seems that the 'natural way' IS to be dependent, on one thing or another.

Next to where I sat down by the pond, there were some vine-like branches twining their way up a light post. Vining flora have an interesting kind of dependency, the need to hang on, to wrap themselves around another object.  Stretching out their limbs, they reach for something stable, then grow their way up and around, letting their bodies bend and coil on something completely foreign to themselves.  They are unabashed in their dependency, letting their vulnerability be on display in all its rawness.  I'm not sure about what happens to plants such as this if they grow and cannot find a stabilizing structure.  Maybe they grow out on the ground, maybe they die without the necessary support.  Either way, without the help and solidity of something that is not a part of them, maybe even not a part of 'nature', they never reach the height they would without it.

When I was growing up in my first house, we had a clematis plant growing up the light post outside by our driveway.  I think a couple of our other neighbors did as well, in various shades of purple, fuschia, magenta, indigo.  I'd lay out on my driveway with my cats, drawing with sidewalk chalk or bending plants in to halos for my head.  One particularly warm Spring day, I remember lying down with my back on the hot, grainy concrete, my head right to the side of the light post.  Studying the Clematis, I couldn't figure out how it kept itself climbing on such a smooth, matte surface as the metal pole.  It had nothing sticky or suction like on its thin, brown vines, and with so many heavy flowers, thickly surrounded with leaves, it seemed against reason that it should be able to twine so high.  There seems to be something in the Clematis' nature that is meant to hold on, meant to grow with something close to it.

I think this is a great part of what makes plants like ivy and clematis so interesting: they seem to have an emotional need for touch, for connection.  They hold a yearning and ache just like all the rest of us.

Blog #3

 

Within me there is a fear and I don't know what it is. Untamed and delicate, it crystallizes on the smallest things, blues a new meaning to the word raw. It crowds and splinters inside the thin tubes of veins and catches like a burr to whatever it can: the blood, a memory, being left behind, settling.  Taking a seat among the fallen, great trunk of the tree with its inside exposed, its splinters raw, I touch the open sinews. Tender wood grips my palm and its smell of wounds and cuts is heady. Sitting in the smell of Spring, the crystals shatter, and raw meets raw as the wood absorbs the unknown.

This afternoon I walked through the woods in a light snow for about an hour.  I was drawn to all the tracks left in the snow, thought about the people who had traveled the paths and braved the weather before I had.  It was gorgeous and quiet, stilled by the white hills that piled on the branches and ground, dressing the trees with a delicate dust.

Along the path to the pond, a humongous tree had fallen, probably in the strong winds of a few days ago, directly on the pathway.  Trunk torn out of the earth, dipping into a small pond, broken in the middle and reaching back up into the sky, and then scattering into thousands of splintering directions.  I walked over to it and took a seat on one of the thick splits of trunk.  The open, exposed wood was so many colors- ambers, rich reds, deep chestnuts, light creams, with the grey brown bark on the outside, delicate light wintergreen fungi on the outside, and the small span of snow on top.  I touched the raw meat of the trunk, felt how warm the very middle was, breathed in the scent.  It smelled like fresh mulch that my dad ordered when I was younger, the pile that sat in the driveway for a week as he and my mom spread it around our trees and garden.  My brothers and I would sit on skateboards on top of what seemed like a mountain of mulch, and coast down the bumpy sides of the hill and fly down the driveway.  It was such an interesting mix of senses to be smelling spring amongst all the winter weather and scenery.  Nostalgic and peaceful, I sat for a while with the tree before moving on towards the pond.

I saw many tracks on the way- footprints of man, small hoof prints of deer, little diamonds of dog paw marks, my own marks following behind me.  I followed the deer prints into a small clearing, hoping slightly to catch the deer lying down in the woods or nuzzling the snow for food.  Instead, I heard a literal breath-taking crack as I realized I was walking across water that had frozen beneath the snow. Tense and terrified, I back tracked as quickly and lightly as I could and decided veering off paths in woods blanketed beneath snow was not the greatest idea.

My pond was covered in snow, save for a small patch of exposed ice and a little water pool by the willows.  All over the surface were great trunks of tree and logs reaching out of the snow.  Along the edge of the water, I investigated the plants today.  Small dry buds of delicate loveliness shook in the wind, and I learned from an information board on the way back through the woods that they were probably White Snakeroot.  There was another plant that interested me, larger dry tufts the shape of dandelion seeds once they've fluffed and blown off the stem. On a tree beyond the them, higher in the woods, small ledges of growth stuck out from the trunk.  I thought how wonderful it would be to be a small chipmunk or a bird and have a ledge such as that to settle on or curl up for a time.

On the way back out, I sat with the trunk again and touched the wood.  I've been having a difficult time lately, with lots of mixed emotions about where I am in my life physically and emotionally, with a distracting sense of unfulfillment and an anxiety about how to settle myself.  Sitting in the tree and focusing on it's texture and smell, and the energy it gave off while also absorbing my own, a felt a sense of calm I'd really be needing lately.