My mind keeps coming back to the trees – the bristlecone pines. I keep coming back the way their contorted wood stands silver in the dry air for hundreds of years after the needles are gone. How, on those still living, whose buttressed trunks anchor in the talus slope, how one rope of bark covers the living tissue, and rises to one spray of needles. How the young bristlecone, four feet high and already my senior, its growth slowed by wind and winter and lack of rain, holds the promise of age.
I come back to how the wind filled the hollow of my ears and sang there. How, when I reached the talus slope, the now-silent cascade of rock, the wind whipped and buffeted me, challenging me to stand, to root, to stay upright. How they thrive in this wind, call this sere and punishing place home, that they don’t choose any other place to live. How when this one, this great grandmother was released from her cone, the alphabet was born and charioteers maneuvered ancient streets.
I remember how the wind kept me from sitting with them, kept me from staying, turned me back toward the comfort of dinner and a tent stretched out in an aspen grove. How, though I wanted their company, I was glad to leave that place, glad to find a place the wind didn’t pull the moisture from my skin and send me side-stepping for balance with its fingers.
You offer such a wonderful sense of Presence in this post, Cricketeer. I am there with those twisted trees and you in the wind and the high desolation.
ReplyDeleteI love these trees, too--
ReplyDeleteVisited last in 2004. The trees weathered, magnificent. I sat down,l eaned against one, and felt my own energy take root, and ground. Visiting these trees, which survive longest in the most adverse of environments: thin air, poor soil, little water, high wind and sun,one feels a fierce pride-- that through this the trees persevere, connected to each other and to all things. At another tree, where a root had been exposed by constructing the trail, a tree ring marking the birth of Christ,was labelled. Touching this living tree, running my fingers over the rings 2500 years back, 4000 years, feeling the tiny ridges and
grooves, like an ancient fingerprint, I received the tree's teaching, history by touch. In the company of these trees, our life is a single pine needle, our nation is the merest seedling, our concerns are in truth not as all encompassing as we imagine.