Today is National Arbor Day! It is a day to acknowledge the beauty and gifts of trees. I wish I would have planted a tree today. I worked in my garden and continued to plant vegetables. I am finding it is a long drawn out process, and I am finding joy in that journey. So this night reflecting on trees and all the analogies that fit for this time in our human experience, I remembered a dear poem that offers a profound perspective. In this time of slowing down and isolation and grieving and wondering, may this poem offer pondering…
The way we stand, you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, leaning in the same way towards the sun. See how we lean together in the same direction. How the dead limbs of one of us rest in the branches of another. How those branches have grown around the limbs. How the two are inseparable. And if you look, you can see the different ways we have taken this place into us. Magnolia, loblolly bay, sweet gum, Southern bayberry, Pacific bayberry; wherever we grow there are many of us; Monterey pine, sugar pine, white-bark pine, four-leaf pine, single-leaf pine, bristle-cone pine, foxtail pine, Torrey pine, Western red pine, Jeffrey pine, bishop pine. And we are various, and amazing in our variety, and our differences multiply, so that edge after edge of the endlessness of possibility is exposed. You know we have grown this way for years. And to no purpose you can understand. Yet what you fail to know we know, and the knowing is in us, how we have grown this way, why these years were not one of them heedless, why we are shaped the way we are, not all straight to your purpose, but to ours. And how we are each purpose, how each cell, how light and soil are in us, how we are in the soil, how we are in the air, how we are both infinitesimal and great and how we are infinitely without any purpose you can see, in the way we stand, each alone, yet none of us separable, none of us beautiful when separate but all exquisite as we stand, each moment heeded in this cycle, no detail unlovely. ~ Susan Griffin from Earth Prayers
Originally Published to Facebook on April 25th, 2020 at https://www.facebook.com/creativecarolcelebrant/photos/a.145438193613047/156787582478108
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