Beneath Holy Boughs

What trees can do for the body, for healing grief, and for finding what is whole and unharmed beneath them.

Zoltán Döbröntei

I've started naming trees on our property. Our newest members are Honey, Apple, Rosemary, and Sigmund. At the bottom of her trunk, Honey has a curved bowl you can curl into. My guess is that she is 75 years old. Her magnificent fir branches are like parasols. All trees are generous, but she is sage and grandmotherly in her company. 

A relentless hunger forces me out of my house by noon. I spend the morning working on my writing, art, children, and house, when an internal disquiet emerges. A prick in my heart I cannot name. A tangle of uncertain threads, sometimes loneliness, affliction, dread, unrequited love, or an unsettling sense of estrangement. Daily, I've walked alongside this emotional specter, granting it movement and daylight, offering solace to its quiet whimpering. I have found, there is a certain time during the day, we must do our emotional labor. All things are rooted in your care, after all. It is your job to detect the snags, twists, and impossible situations. When you've listened to everything, you decide what's most powerful. Your heart. Your openness, freedom, and fluidity should take priority. Make space for each sound to rise and fall, appear and disappear. You are a living ear receiving sound, receiving silence.

Honey, with her hushed presence, makes caring for this weeping wound more bearable. The world is normally noisy and clumsy in how it treats its people, but trees clean the body better than anything else can. With delicate ease, they drain and channel through. In the ground layer of the body, she works deep inside cells and dust. There is a great deal of silence and subtlety in her remedies and repairs. In her presence, I am shown how to deal with my grief, my homesickness, my wildly sensitive heart.

When I came to her the other day, her arms wagged all at once. As I exhaled, I rested my heavy head on her trunk. I should take off my shoes and socks and lay under her, she instructs. She does not speak as words, but as an urge. She loves to ease our unnoticed burdens. Honey tells me that trees, like her, help dissipate grief. Aware of our forgetfulness and soreness, she stands ready to serve, requiring only that we remember the source.

Laying down on the ground with my bare feet flat, I opened up to her about everything I had in me. The unconsolable and downhearted feelings I experience sometimes. Embarrassed and misshapen. Hostile, stubborn and altogether too full of freight. I confess to how often I feel like an orphan, a refugee, or a missing person. Confounded by the harm and cruelty that springs from our hands. She listens, then absorbs impurities, trapping them in her bark and needles and dispenses fresh bright air. Within a few minutes, my forgetfulness has faded. The shield around my body unbuckles, as it no longer needs to defend itself from intrusive, unkind thoughts. Honey changes them for me. In this alchemy of emotion, Honey becomes both healer and confidante, a custodian of the sacred space where vulnerability and strength intertwine. My numbed-out trundling stops as decomposing sticks and damp spongy earth, ferments and composts the nonessential.Honey teases out the knots and leaves only the small, the beautiful, the necessary. A connected body to the earth. Lucid mind and heart. Innocence. Bird song, sky, petrichor. The Holy.  

It took time, but I've learned that everything has its place in the intricate web of existence. Secrets seek release, and nature illuminates the hidden with unexpected knocks at the door. We are euphoric or trapped in pandemonium. Depending on the hour, one or the other seeks acknowledgment, a call to be felt and fed. These sweeping moods aren't mere drivel; they are sentient and wise, demanding equanimity, inclusivity, nature, melody, and honesty. Keeping it concealed only haunts an innocent heart.

“The greatest pain is not to be welcome. The Holy feels this too…”

~Martin Prechtel.

The term "holy" traces back to Old English, derived from Proto-Germanic, meaning whole or uninjured. It embodies a desire for connection, remembering, and homecoming—a hunger from the center of the earth.

I realized early on that my heart longed for something absent. My life has been spent walking toward the whole and uninjured, learning to hear the Holy within and for myself. It has been a long walk up the side of a mountain. Learning to sit with my ear against tree bark, my hands deep in a creek, and my heart split and leaking. Observed, loved, revered - worship of water, light, and my own melody. This is what the Holy has led me to do. To forget my little will. Leave a wide opening. We have to be willing to see. This is about the heart. Can we bear it?

Thankfully, its large knuckled fist knocks on my door, and summons me to feed and feel it every day. It forces me out into the field, asks me to share my secrets, and then makes a poultice to smear over my eyes. It laughs and cries with me, and carefully helps me turn over every stone. It reminds me to admire. It uses every part of this animal body of mine and leaves nothing wasted. Even the dark bits are stirred from the bottom of the pot. The Holy pulls me out of distraction and makes sacred my attention and time. It uses my hands to paint pictures on cave walls from ashes. I learn to bring beauty out of my body and into the world. It gives it legs and hands and a voice strong enough to reach into a heart. It gives me ears to hear the trees, Honey calling out to me. The mute and the silent speaking. All from a pain in the gut that cannot be ignored.

The moment we are born, we cry, we are cold, but we are whole and uninjured. We are alive, compressed, contorted, and pruned, but we are whole and unharmed. Our bodies die, withdraw, return, collapse uninjured and whole. We are all holy, each one of us. All the way through.

How did you sense that you were born in the absence of something? What have you made of that original cry? Have you made a nest for your sound at the back of your throat? Can you tell me what you learned from the fire?

1. Unknown photographer 2. Photography, Harley Weir

The impossible thought in the midst of day or night is the Holy sitting with you, trying to bring you from dissociation into a state of alertness, to love the entirety of existence. It gives back life and Self, revealing a more truthful and wise connection with pine trees and rivers, with blood and vitality. The collapse is the surface world falling away, revealing something more truthful. To scare you out of the superficial and into the wilderness. Into spacious, untamed gardens. That not easily slaked hunger we all feel, is the divine foot kicking us out the door. It is the fir tree in your backyard waving at you, and your bare feet aching inside your shoes. It is you and I who are led by something whole and uninjured asking to be remembered. Every day it calls, have you started the long walk up the mountain?

With its hand, I now know to follow, no matter what the time is. It has only ever carried me to the roots of trees and into the company of eagles and ravens. It is as gentle as it is fierce. Settle down - you have everything you need right before you. Look around. "The wheat is golden, waiting for this moment."-Natalie Goldberg.

love,

Sarah