Of trees and leaves and cancer

Holy autumn. I’ve been so enthralled with the trees and their colors that I actually got lost in my own neighborhood the other night. Taking a walk and not looking at street signs. Lost in beauty I guess you’d say.

Trees. When I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York several months ago, I wandered through an amazing exhibit focused on our communication with things—how we talk to and listen to the tangibles of our environment. One of the highlights of the exhibit was putting on earphones and listening to the sounds of sap moving through a tree. Listening to the sounds a tree makes. Someone had “miked” a tree and the result was a sweet soft sound, a sound full of energy and life—a sound from a tree we generally perceive as mute. In my life I’ve heard the sound of dripping sap from maples in Vermont in the spring. I’ve heard the sound of a branch cracking as it broke from the trunk of a tree. I’ve heard the sound of leaves whistling and whirling, and of rain on leaves. But I’d never thought about the voices inside a tree. I felt like I had entered a holy of holies—even though I was surrounded by all kinds of people and movement and noise in the museum. I didn’t want to leave.

Leaves. Astonishing colors on our leaves this autumn in Sonoma County. We’re probably at the peak right now, before the rains take them all away. They are dancing in the wind, reflecting the light, and beginning to cover the ground; in every way reminding us that the time of letting go is upon us. Soon the trees will be bare—their skeletons speaking with startling clarity of our strength and of our mortality.

Autumn. My dictionary tells me it’s “the time of full maturity” or as it puts it “sometimes, the early stages of decline.” I have a hard time distinguishing between the two. My own self seems to be perhaps a mixture of both—or maybe that’s just denial on my part, the evidence of a slide into decline is definitely clear. Parts aren’t able to do what they once did, that’s for sure. And I’ve been dropping leaves, some of them beautiful and rich in texture and color, for a long time now. Letting go, paring down, becoming, I pray, more transparent, more skeletal.

Cancer.  Some very dear friends are living with cancer this Autumn. When I walk among the trees I think of them. One of them who has lung cancer tells me that he is always congested and every breath he takes reminds him of his mortality. Another tells me she may try medical marijuana, she has lost so much weight under treatment. Another, whose latest round of treatment bore good results, tells me that the good news is in the context of the possible continued spread of the disease to other areas of her body. For them this has become an autumn time, a time of letting go, of centering down, of concentrated rootedness, a time of clarity: when the essentials are laid bare in the swirl of falling leaves. There are loss, uncertainty, grief, pain, fear, and exhaustion at the autumnal edges. There are also faith, hope, courage, real strength, and dare I say, an exquisite beauty in each of these people. If you listen closely you are privileged to hear the murmur of the life-force within. The Holy of Holies.

Jesus. Bruno Barnhart in The Good Wine describes Jesus as a tree. “The human tree which is Jesus sends its roots deep and sends its branches high, a manifold bridge of life. It swallows up the separation of sin and death, and the law’s distinction of good and evil, in the one, unrejecting life.” He goes on say that a tree is a “witness standing, moving, in the changing wind and sun, it speaks within us where its likeness lives and grows, joining the world in one.” My friends, in a way, offer this witness, as do the trees. I am thankful for each.

Barnhart, Bruno. The Good Wine. Wipf & Stock Publishers (December 2008),p. 86.

The MOMA Exhibit was “Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects.” It closed on November 7, but there is information about it at http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1080