Something I’ve forgotten calls me away
from the picnic table to tall trees
at the far end of the clearing.
I remember lying on grass
being still, studying forks of branches
with their thousands of leaves.
While trees accrued their secret rings
life spread a great canopy
of family, work, ordinary activity.
I mislaid what once moved me…
~Margaret Hass

I know a tree. It sits at the intersection of two roads I travel over and over daily. Sometimes on wheels and sometimes on foot. It is a tree that has lived in this neighborhood for so many more years than I have and has kept watch over the comings and goings of lives past, present and future. Its shade has been comfort to a bus stop on hot, summer days and a cool, housing place for a tire swing for the children who live nearby. 

But in the last couple of years, this tree has been visibly dying. Its leaves no longer sprout in the way it once did. In one of this summertime’s windy days, of which we have seen many, an entire large limb was cut off by the unseen forces and fell to cover a part of the well traveled road. Its secret rings, its great canopy is folding up. And yet, part of this connector of earth and heaven refuses to give up. In the hollow of it a green shoot has begun to show forth its inner life. What a spirit of resilience! Seeing it was a sign of an enduring hope that filled my own spirit. I am so glad I noticed its arrival and how it continues to hold space into what is now unfolding into winter.

…Today I have time to follow
the melody of green wherever it goes,
a tune, maybe hummed
when I was too young
to have the words I wanted
and know how a body returns 
to familiar refrains…

Clearly, this tree has decided it has just a bit more within to return to ‘familiar refrains.’ Reflecting on the last years and all that has happened in our world, like many folks, I find I am reawakening every day to another piece of what was once familiar. And within that awaking there is such joy, such promise for what may still become. I also find that I am aware of those parts of this beautiful Creation that have continued to point we human ones to the life that always beat, the life that stands rooted and points us toward the impetus that lives at the center of our beating heart and at the center of this beating Universe. Life. Life in all its fullness. And its strong desire to pull us into becoming all we are capable of. 

…Now like a child, I sit down, lie back,
look up at the crowns of maple,
needled pine and a big-hearted boxwood.
Fugitive birds dart in and out.
In the least little wind, birch leaves turn
and flash silver like a school of minnows.
Clouds range in the blue sky
above earth’s great geniuses
of shelter and shade.

Each time I pass by this sentinel of wood, I will glance up toward the leaves that want to continue to grow. Like the ‘fugitive birds that dart in and out’, I will allow the wisdom of this tree to be a strong reminder of the possible, the hopeful, the promising. When you are in the presence of ‘earth’s great geniuses’, it seems the proper thing to do.