Today it kind of almost felt like my sense of community was coming back.

There is a person I pass every day on the walk across campus. You know, you can do that for years without ever saying anything to each other. I’ve done that before. But three days ago I started nodding and saying good morning. And this person smiles and says good morning back. So what had been, for a couple of months, an internal observation—oh there’s that person again. is that person running late, or am I running early?—has become a small act of connection with more than just the trees. Sometimes it feels like no one wants to intrude on any one or risk someone being mean, so we all go around ignoring each other.

I’ve moved from work projects that required a lot solitary, abstract brain work to a number of faster moving projects that require more interaction with colleagues across campus.

I saw that someone’s car was in the market parking lot when I swung by on the way home from work. I went back and forth about whether to find them and say hello. I felt a bit anxious about how it might be awkward, given the way long-standing friendships and recently defunct romantic relationships had lined up. But I saw him sitting alone and the desire to say hi overrode anxiety.

I was just going to say hi, grab some groceries, and go home to check some things off of my list, but instead we ended up talking for quite a while. With my odd sense of time, I couldn’t tell you how long. But it was very good. And because I sat there talking for a while, I also ran into someone I hadn’t seen in quite a while, but had been thinking about recently. She will be on campus when school starts, so perhaps I will have the chance to see her more often.

Then a co-worker was in the produce section.

Then a large shiny black beetle was frantically on its back on the floor underneath the apricots. I turned him over, but it seemed like he was having trouble walking on the slick smooth floor. So I carried him out the in door (omg I broke a rule!) and deposited him outside.

One of the things I was going to (and eventually did) check off my list tonight was exercising. I run in place on an exercise trampoline. I haven’t done much exercise since starting work at the library in January, but I ran last night and tonight. Exercise is good for the brain and I need all the help I can get right now. One extra good thing about running is that it is captive time. I’m moving but stationary. I can stay still enough (while moving furiously) to watch things—films, talks, etc.

For the past two nights, I’ve been watching “Mindfulness and the Brain: A Professional Training in the Science and Practice of Meditative Awareness.” It’s at the intersection of Buddhist practice and interpersonal neurobiology, so it is a good reminder of the possibility of integration and connectedness.

It is good to re-hear The Good News About Neuroplasticity. Lately my faith had been wearing a bit thin.

The Dream Encyclopedia I mentioned in the previous post does not contain an entry for “woodpecker-monkey-man.” That was the most interesting recurring dream character I’ve run into recently.

Weirdly enough, until very recently, you could buy this on Etsy. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw it.

woodpecker monkey

Some days I look at literally multiple thousands of book titles. Mostly they scroll past on my screen really quickly. I’m looking for coding patterns and encoding oddities rather than reading the words. But I often do read the words. At least some of them. And it can be really difficult not to go, “oooh, what’s that?” and click on the link to the ebook.

These are some titles we recently added that tempted me.

• Dialogue on the infinity of love
• Doing psychotherapy effectively
• Discipline and punish
• The madman’s middle way
• Foraging: behavior and ecology
• You are still being lied to: the remixed Disinformation guide to media distortion, historical whitewashes and cultural myths
• Databases: a beginner’s guide
• Coaching and mentoring: practical conversations to improve learning
• The craft of research
• The dream encyclopedia
• Brothels, depravity, and abandoned women: illegal sex in antebellum New Orleans
• B-sides, undercurrents and overtones: peripheries to popular in music, 1960 to the present
• Being white in the helping professions: developing effective intercultural awareness
• Cognitive biology: evolutionary and developmental perspectives on mind, brain, and behavior
• Choosing craft: the artist’s viewpoint
• Wild justice: the moral lives of animals
• A short introduction to attachment and attachment disorder
• Brain sense: the science of the senses and how we process the world around us
• Nothing: a very short introduction
• The secret history of emotion: from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to modern brain science
• Impotence: a cultural history
• The politics of small things: the power of the powerless in dark times
• Marriage and cohabitation
• Headless males make great lovers: & other unusual natural histories
• Collections of nothing
• Ecological intelligence: rediscovering ourselves in nature
• Seeing ghosts: 9/11 and the visual imagination
• Day of the Dead in the USA: the migration and transformation of a cultural phenomenon
• Speaking of information: the Library juice quotation book
• From demons to Dracula: the creation of the modern vampire myth
• Everyday readers: reading and popular culture

Overall that’s a pretty good slice of my interests and obsessions. It all came across my desk in 15 minutes one day. I could spend half my time at work making lists of all the things I see that I’ll never have time to glance at, much less read.

This job has taught me things about letting go of information hoarding tendencies.

Have I mentioned that I like my job and I hope I get to keep it? Personnel called me today to set up a phone interview. This is how it is regularly done, apparently, but it amuses me that I will be interviewed over the phone by a group of people sitting in a conference room on the second floor while I sit in the first floor office of someone who will be away from her desk because she will be upstairs in the conference room interviewing me. She offered me her office so I could shut the door instead of subjecting my entire department to my interview conversation from my cube.

No one besides you has your God. He is always with you, yet you see him in others, and thus he is never with you. You strive to draw to yourself those who seem to possess your God. You will come to see that they do not possess him, and that you alone have him. Thus you are alone among men—in the crowd and yet alone. Solitude in multitude—ponder this.

…

My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you, therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you.

The touchstone is being alone with oneself.

This is the way.

–C.G. Jung, Liber Secundus, p. 329 & 330.

of course, one would never spout off about how being alone with yourself is a noble, evolved thing so they could feel better about habitually avoiding the utterly existential hell of les autres¹ since people have so often been hurtful—intentionally or not—that it is more comforting to be in solitude than engage in attempts at human connection which inevitably end in tears. cough. cough.

This video and the positive response to it give me an idea. If solitude is a skill that can be learned and people need to be encouraged to develop it, perhaps there is a niche for the Solitude Coach to provide intermediate steps and support. Like, the coach would arrange to show up at the same restaurant as you and pretend she doesn’t know you so that you know you will not be the only person there eating alone… get used to appearing to be alone before you actually go it alone. And so on.

Someone more entrepreneurial than me can do something with that one. Perhaps Death Bear needs a sidekick…

1. And in that little essay is a rich starting point for another essay on the oft-underestimated effect of emotional abuse on children, but I don’t have the time or energy for that today… [↩]

Celebrate Something

If only the absence of the co-worker whose life’s dull plot
you know by heart,
or the shiny nose on the tiny bust of the great dead man
on the lobby wall.
Lean away from the desk, instead toward the window, its view of a bend
in the tracks where the bullet trains whoosh by, blurring
present and past and the many years you hope to have ahead.
Then walk home at a loll, letting the lush profusion of nasturtium
and the sound of the phrase itself re-instill the loyalty to beauty
that work downplays, savor the way trout tune their flex to turbulence
to survive the whitest water, as well as the triumph of mystery
in the stutter-step flight of a common butterfly,
which evades understanding and so ensures the simple questions
will continue to be asked, for example, how does it fly and did your wife know
by placing the pot of night-blooming tobacco at the back door
in her absence its perfume would moisten your sleep
until her return; and isn’t it luck that each ladder in the cherry orchard
wedges so safely against a tree of almost any shape,
long marriages are like that;
and the urge to be wholly known, the places it takes us,
the villa among the black pines where the table out back is laid for two,
you and a beloved, sweet cakes, warm milk, and ten sorts of dates await you
when you rise refreshed from the blue dreams of early morning that waft
like smoke out the bedroom window, open to allow the breezes of love
to envelop you all night long—can you recall the way?

- Emily Wheeler

I got to the middle of this poem and felt tricked as it twisted itself into a love poem. That admitted, I still liked it and will continue to celebrate in the manner of the first half, cultivating optimistic curiosity about whether I shall ever celebrate in the manner of the latter half.¹

We’ll see.

1. Feeling free to replace “wife” with “partner” and “marriages” with “deep romantic relationships.” [↩]

I would urge you to do so as soon as possible.

It is like the scent of freshly mown grass, aged for a hundred of years until it is clean deep wise warm green.

After a storm the other day I found some large oak leaves on the ground at McCorkle Place. I tucked three into the notebook I carry in my purse, which lately serves more as a receptacle for found leaves and feathers than as a notebook.

I thought it might be interesting to play with some printing using the leaves. When I got home that evening and opened the notebook to retrieve them, the scent of the leaves burst out and overtook me.

Now, when I walk through McCorkle Place, I can pick out the oak smell.

I imagine I will become an inveterate leaf sniffer now.

I had a nice dinner at my friend’s new house tonight. I took my Vitamix over and made Krank Juice while he whipped up some vegetables we ate with soba.

Now a thunderstorm is rolling in.

I read this soon after it was published and think of it often. When I was small I whined for the chicken heart when my mother made chicken and dumplings. I also got in trouble for poking at the dead iced fishes’ eyes in the grocery store. Perhaps I’m a buzzard come back as a human.

Excerpt from On Coming Back as a Buzzard (If you believe in coming back)
by Lia Purpura
Published in the September/October 2009 issue of Orion magazine

Yes, it looks like I hover, and the hovering, I know, suggests a discomfiting eagerness. Malevolence. Why is that? I haven’t killed a thing. If the waiting seems untoward, it may be confirming something too real, too true: all the parts that slip from sight, can’t be easily had, collapse in on themselves and require digging, all the parts that promise small, intense bursts of sweetness unnerve us—while the easily abundant, the spans, the expanses (thick haunch, round belly and shoulder), all that lifts easily to another’s lips, and retains its form till the end—seems pure. Right and deserved. Proper and lawful. Thus butchers have their neat diagrams. One knows to call for chop, loin, shank, rump.

I’d get to be one who, when passed the plate, seeks first the succulent eye. This would mark me: foreigner. Stubborn lover of scraps and dark meat. Base. Trained on want and come to love piecemeal offerings—the shreds and overlooked tendernesses too small for a meal, but carefully, singularly gathered—like brief moments that burst: isolate beams of sun in truck fumes, underside of wrist against wrist, sudden cool from a sewer grate rising. I incline toward the tucked and folded parts (the old country can’t be bred out of me), the internals with names that lack correspondence, the sweetbreads and umbles, bungs, hoods, liver-and-lights. If the road is a plate, then the outskirts of fields and settlements where piles are heaped are plates, too. And the gullies, the ditches, the alleys—all plates. I’d get to reorder your thoughts about troves, to prove the spilled and shoveled-aside to be treasure. To reconfer notions of milk and honey, and how to approach the unbidden.

Augustine included curiositas in his catalog of vices, identifying it as one of the three forms of lust (concupiscentia) that are the beginning of all sin (lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and ambition of the world). The overly curious mind exhibits a “lust to find out and know,” not for any practical purpose but merely for the sake of knowing. Thanks to the “disease of curiosity” people go to watch freaks in circuses and charlatans in the piazzas. Augustine saw no essential difference between such perverse entertainments and the “empty longing and curiosity [that is] dignified by the names of learning and science.”

via Morbid Anatomy.

* i.e. not much.

On my mantel, I have constructed what I refer to as the “Voices altar.”¹ It is a place to remember gratitude and connectedness, not to worship. I have arranged images of people whose voices have gotten me through, convinced me I was not the only one like me when I felt most alone, and essentially collectively saved my life. Call them part of the pantheon in my personal mythology.

I won’t go into who all is represented, but the crowd includes both Henry Miller and Fred Rogers, so it’s an interesting bunch.

D.H. Lawrence is included. In high school I read The Rainbow, Women in Love, and of course, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s books may have been the first place I got the message that sensuality and sexuality could be reveled in without shame, guilt, or fear. That they might be celebrated instead of denigrated. That they are part and parcel of spirituality, and that spirituality is a different beast than religion. That life itself is to be celebrated instead of tolerated or suffered until one gains entrance to “a better place.”

So, thank you D.H. Lawrence.

Holly Gray at Don’t Call Me Sibyl is also grateful and writes in An Open Letter to D.H. Lawrence:

But your bird inspires me and awakens the feral in me, reminding me of the wild thing I once was and can be again. The ropes that hold me down are merely the ghosts of ropes that dissolved long ago. My illusions are all that oppress me now.

I was grateful to run across that post while skimming over Dr. Kathleen Young’s July 2010 Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse. The theme was Independence.

What I have been wondering is how to gain independence from the tyrannical need to be “independent.” From the outside this “independence” easily appears strong, sure, and self-sufficient. From the inside, one can romanticize one’s life and identify with D.H. Lawrence’s Baby Tortoise²:

…

Voiceless little bird,
Resting your head half out of your wimple
In the slow dignity of your eternal pause.
Alone, with no sense of being alone,
And hence six times more solitary;
Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through
immemorial ages
Your little round house in the midst of chaos.

Over the garden earth,
Small bird,
Over the edge of all things.

Traveller,
With your tail tucked a little on one side
Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.

All life carried on your shoulder,
Invincible fore-runner.

If you look closer, however, you see the independence is brittle. It is brittle because it is fear, not independence. When one learns certain lessons early in life, one learns it is less painful just to turn inward and become an absolutely self-sustaining emotional unit. Like many coping mechanisms, this works brilliantly when needed, but later becomes unhelpful and extremely difficult to shake.

When I first heard about it, I thought Biosphere 2 was an inspiring, beautiful concept. But rather than succeed as a hermetically-sealed self-sufficient paradise, that project demonstrated how quickly such a system can poison itself and become infested.

The child who learns not to get attached to people and that emotions and needs get her into trouble becomes the woman who insists upon being dropped off at the emergency room by herself, calls no one to come when she learns she will have surgery, and recovers from the operation alone except for one friend bringing pajamas and books to the hospital, another fetching her home, and another bringing a load of groceries and drugs the first night.

Such habitual defenses are so difficult to shake precisely because they are rightly owed a spot on the Voices altar. Donald Kalsched writes of an inner Protector/Persecutor as part of what he calls the archetypal self-care system. The Protector aspect devises the defense strategies, and the Persecutor aspect attacks and blames the self when it goes beyond defenses and gets hurt:

It functions, if we can imagine its inner rationale, as a kind of inner “Jewish Defense League” (whose slogan, after the Holocaust, reads “never Again!”). “Never again,” says our tyrannical caretaker, will the traumatized personal spirit of this child suffer this badly! Never again will it be this helpless in the face of cruel reality….before this happens I will disperse it into fragments [dissociation], or encapsulate it and soothe it with fantasy [schizoid withdrawal], or numb it with intoxicating substances [addiction], or persecute it to keep it from hoping for life in this world [depression]….In this way I will preserve what is left of this prematurely amputated childhood — of an innocence that has suffered too much too soon!”

Despite the otherwise well-intentioned nature of our Protector/Persecutor, there is a tragedy lurking in these archetypal defenses. And here we come to the crux of the problem for the traumatized individual and simultaneously the crux of the problem for the psychotherapist trying to help. This incipient tragedy results from the fact that the Protector/Persecutor is not educable. The primitive defense does not learn anything about realistic danger as the child grows up. It functions on the magical level of consciousness with the same level of awareness it had when the original trauma or traumas occurred.

And so the question is: how does one convince an uneducable part of oneself that is about as trusting as a feral cat to open up and connect fully with people when the nature of the world and everything in it is impermanence? The trouble is finding the middle place of being with between grasping and rejecting³. With every loss, disappointment, or betrayal the Protector/Persecutor picks up another beam of evidence with which to beat you and then build walls.

Kalsched says the answer is grief.

Those in the know say blog posts should be brief.

1. I use the word altar, though it is probably more correctly called a shrine, but the word shrine calls up images of men in fezzes on tricycles, which is not what I’m going for here. [↩]
2. Remember, sometimes tortoises help tortoises, too. [↩]
3. i.e. grasping at not-grasping [↩]

I first read a little Freud when I was an undergrad. I had a friend who was fairly obsessed with him and thought he was brilliant. Honestly, he gave me the heebie-jeebies in his obsession with sexualizing everything and the incest theme. Also, when you have been close to people who have deeply suffered because of incestuous childhood sexual abuse, it is difficult to read about memories of childhood sexual abuse being “fantasies” without wanting to throw the book across the room.

I will eventually get around to reading some more Freud, because I don’t feel like I can say anything intelligent about his ideas without doing so.

However, I keep reading other stuff about the origin and development of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories and Freud continues to come off as a narrow-minded, sexually obsessed, insecure control freak. It seems he was continually having dramatic “friend/colleague breakups” because the other person got an idea that Freud disagreed with or felt threatened by.

Perhaps everyone was always having these fall outs with everyone else back in the day, but Freud was the most famous so his always get mentioned? At any rate, I know he was important for establishing a method of studying and working with the unconscious, but each time I read about one of Freud’s puerile freakouts, I think someone else leaps in front of him on my reading list. Now Sandor Ferenczi (who eventually had a big break with Freud) has been added to the list… ahead of Freud.

So, I get this on a recurrent basis:

eyepox dendrite

I call it eyepox. My ophthalmologists¹ call it infectious epithelial herpes simplex virus (HSV) keratitis.

Lo, I have the superpower of manifesting normal medical conditions in relatively odd ways. I had recurring self-resolving appendicitis from the age of 15 until 31. No doctor could figure out my weird “stomach attacks.” Finally my doctor told me to go to the ER the next time I had one, and voila! No more appendix for me.

And so instead of getting cold sores like the vast majority of people with activated HSV-1, I get infectious epithelial herpes simplex virus (HSV) keratitis. Hooray.

The overall experience is different every time.

The first time I had an outbreak, I suddenly realized I was 70% blind in one eye. That was extremely frightening.

Once I got double vision. Once I just got halos around lights. Once my vision was fine but my eye felt like I’d been holding it open for five days. Once it felt like the inside of my eyelid was made of coarse sandpaper and it hurt so much to open my eye that I laid on the floor of my office with my eyes closed for two days, listening to podcasts and talks on the Interwebs.

There is an unmistakable familiar feeling associated with an outbreak, though, and I felt it today: a dull ache behind my eyeball that occasionally became sharp, accompanied by a feeling of slight pressure, like someone’s finger is laying across my eyelid. Not pushing, just touching. My doctor sees no evidence of outbreak, but has previously commented that I’m “exquisitely sensitive” to the sensation of the early stage of an outbreak.

Now I am on 2000mg a day (up from my normal preventative 800mg) of acyclovir and pins and needles about whether it is going to develop.

I write this partially because it is what is going on. I left work early today for the eye doctor, and then slept most of the late afternoon before going out for sushi and ice cream with my friend TJ. I slept because I was annoyed by the feeling of having my eyes open.

I write this partially because I will write something related to it later.

I write this partially to celebrate better living through chemicals, as my doctor informed me today that, as of April of this year, a new antiviral eyedrop is available that a) is not toxic to the healthy cells of the eye and thus will not hurt as much to use; and b) does not have to be administered as frequently as the drop I’ve always used before.

1. I have two, and I have their cell phone numbers. [↩]

Pick me, pick me!

My temp job finally came up as a permanent position. Fingers crossed.

I think the wording, “You have successfully applied for…” could inspire false hope.

This was the word that kept coming to my mind over the weekend: respite.

First, the heat broke. It will be back up to 93°F tomorrow, and I’ll close the windows and turn the A/C on before I go to work tomorrow. But since Friday afternoon, the windows have been open, letting in fresh air and cicada song.

Second, I took an unplanned rest retreat. The only souls I spoke to from Friday at 5pm until this morning at 9:45am were my cats. And they aren’t very good conversationalists. I didn’t play any music, except for a drumming recording last night as I was preparing for bed. After working for a little while on Saturday morning, I mostly avoided the computer, except to watch a documentary Saturday night. I read. I slept. I went feral and loved my silence, solitude, and the smell of the crooks of my elbows. By Sunday evening, I felt recharged enough to take on some neglected cleaning projects. I finally took care of a fairly large energy/emotion suck from my downstairs that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to dismantle in the aftermath of a recent relationship end/shift/change. I feel home in my home again.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Walking across McCorkle Place this evening, I stopped at Dancer the oak and gathered some of the sawdust still in little piles beneath her. I crouched at her foot and leaned my back against her trunk, observing mushrooms poking up through the mulch.

Ah, the mushroom connection…. le-champignon… that’s another story for later (and/or years ago and possibly still buried somewhere around this site…). What struck me about them today was how the mushrooms themselves are fairly soft and squishy, usually velvety to the touch. Yet suddenly, here they are, appearing to have silently exploded from the earth when I wasn’t looking. Mulch and soil are pushed aside like so much rubble.

I was quickly beset by vicious mosquitoes, so I did not linger with Dancer and the mushrooms. I did notice, however, that her fallen limb was purposefully cut. I assume this would not have been done without good reason, but the fact that it was done in such a way that two lower limbs were damaged made me a bit angry. So it goes. Breathe it out and inhale perspective. How many of my lifetimes would fit in the lifetime of that tree right now? How many of me would fit inside her trunk? What are my concerns really worth? The answer is so faint it passes like one leaf scuttling across the brick path.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

After work I went grocery shopping and was once again astounded at how expensive it is to eat the healthy food I do these days—mainly fresh organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. And some cottage cheese, maple nut Clif bars, and cherry Larabars. Oh yes, and frozen Indian entrees. I’m not that virtuous. I am very grateful that I can afford my diet. I couldn’t afford to eat this way before January, and there are a billion ways things could unfold. I don’t assume I’ll always be able to afford it.

Part of the weekend’s unplanned retreat was avoiding the grocery story by raiding the freezer and pantry for some older staple foods like pasta and some frozen vegetables. I love pasta, but I can notice a big difference in how I feel after a big bowl of pasta versus a VitaMix full of grapes, celery, kale, and apple. I just note this and appreciate the fact that I can keep myself well-stocked with fresh bright things to eat if I deign to leave my house.

Speaking of being grateful for good food, I started The Fruitful Darkness this weekend. It is written in a somewhat revelatory tone, but most of what she is saying is not news to me. Animals and trees deserve respect? We are all connected at the root of things? Yes. Being reminded doesn’t hurt, but seeing animals and trees is a better reminder than reading it in a book. A number of things I’d like to read more about seem like mere sketches. All that said, I’m still reading it, so I’m getting something out of it. I mention it here because it includes this Zen gatha by Thich Nhat Hanh, to be recited before eating:

In this plate of food,
I see the entire universe
supporting my existence.

I have a fairly visceral negative reaction to being asked to stop and say something, or listen to someone else say something, before I eat. This comes from years of being forced to hold hands before sitting down to eat in order to listen to someone ramble on to/about the “heavenly father,” who had the power to “bless the hands that prepared this food and the hands that brought it to us,” and to bestow “traveling mercies” on anyone who would be leaving after the meal. There is nothing offensive in the literal experience of this, but it taps a much-deeper vein of memory of assimilation by the Southern Baptist Borg at a time when resistance was truly futile. The quoted phrases above are enough to make me want to kick something if I dwell on them for a moment or two.

These days my practice is to push right into harmless things to which I have a knee-jerk negative reaction. This is what led to me doing karaoke “I Wanna Be Sedated” in my friend’s yard a few months ago. I do not do karaoke, see. Oh yeah? I’ll show me.

The above gatha resonates just enough that it may be the thing to deflate my pre-meal blessings reaction. We’ll see. If I can remember to think about it. Speaking of mental lapses, I apparently forgot I ordered The Fruitful Darkness and ordered it again, because I now have two copies.

I came to my computer to post something else from the book, and talk of food got me off track. This is unattributed on p. 157, and I love it:

Soil for legs
Axe for hands
Flower for eyes
Bird for ears
Mushroom for nose
Smile for mouth
Songs for lungs
Sweat for skin
Wind for mind

As I slowly drove the winding narrow road home from the grocery this evening, a hawk flew low across the street. Right in front of my car he seemed to transition from head-first laser-targeting to talons-first landing in the woods. All I really caught a glimpse of were barred tail feathers spread out as he disappeared behind foliage.

Treasures, all around… magic things…

God made love to me,
Soothed away my gravity,
Gave me a pair of angel wings,
Clear vision and some magic things.
God is love to me.
Thank you for those things.
Understand the world we’re living in—
Love can mean anything.

–Tim Booth

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

— by David Wagoner, reproduced in David Whyte’s book, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, p. 261-2.

When I was a child, I named the trees around our various houses¹ and had a ritual of walking to each of them and saying hello. In fourth grade I wanted to be a dryad. I wrote something for school in which the main character was a dryad. I don’t remember anything about the plot, but I do remember my teacher marking off points because, he commented, you cannot just make up words like “dryad.”² I tried to explain to no avail, and remember this moment clearly—a snapshot of impotent frustration and rage.

Since I began working as electronic resources cataloger at Davis Library on January 11 of this year, I have crossed McCorkle Place nearly every work day. Here is a description of McCorkle Place from a June 18, 2008 UNC tree and foundation plant evaluation of the space:

Over 680 taxa were cataloged. The number reflects the building foundation shrubs and small trees. However, the essence of McCorkle resides in the splendid diversity of noble trees anchored by the Quercus alba, white oak, with 88% (22/25) rated “high” and three “moderate”. These white oaks may parallel in age those on Polk Place. The exciting aspect is the exceedingly vibrant health of these trees. Canopies were full and dense, foliage saturated blue-green, leaves plump and oversized, bark and trunks without wounds and abrasions.

At least 15 Quercus taxa were identified at McCorkle. In fact, the genus constitutes 54% of the total trees. The three Quercus michauxii (could be Q. montana), swamp chestnut oak, are magnificent. …

…McCorkle should never be cluttered with small-stature trees. The great boles of the noble trees, the canopies providing cooling shade, architectural winter silhouettes, subtle to riotous fall colors, early fresh green from the Liriodendron to the mouse-ear-gray and -pink of the Quercus alba…Heaven-sent. McCorkle only needs tweaking.

All of that and it’s the cement-filled Davie Poplar that gets everybody’s attention.

I consider mindfully walking through this space to be part of my spiritual practice. Of course, some days I miss it completely because I am trying to explain things to a maladaptive introject or planning my work tasks for the day. But most days I am silently saying hello to the trees, thanking them for their lush shade, and feeling the places in the brick path where their roots create subtle bumps.

Family portrait

In April, there were many “small-stature trees.” They sprang up where the large-stature trees had dropped their acorns. I’m not sure what was done to them, but it wasn’t friendly, because the areas beneath the trees were soon covered in neat, clean mulch with no fresh green popping through.

Looking out at the big wide world

Over time names have come into my head for some of the trees. One is Jonah. My favorite is Dancer, the “mom” in the above family portrait. I was slightly horrified on Monday to come upon her surrounded by caution tape, one of her limbs cut into pieces on the ground beneath her. Her large lower limb³ now has a scar from this higher limb’s fall.

Jonah's foot

There are certain things that come up time and again in my own personal mythologizing (or psychologizing), and thus my dreams, my art, and my words. Trees are one of them, which is not surprising given the richness of tree symbolism across world cultures. It is time for me to begin writing about these symbols and themes in a more organized manner than I have in the past, so this may be the first in a series of personal mythology posts. We’ll see.⁴

At any rate, two lovely tree-related things that have nothing to do with me except that I’ve purchased them:

The Night Life of Trees

Book: The Night Life of Trees by Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai and Ram Singh Urveti

Intricately drawn visions of trees fill the pages of this sumptuous book of art and folklore from the Gond tribe in central India. In Gond belief, trees stand in the middle of life, and the spirit of many things lie in them. They are busy all day, giving shade and support and shelter and food to all. Only when night falls can they find rest for themselves, and then, under quiet dark skies, the spirits that live in them are revealed. Recreated from original art by Ram Singh Urveti, Bhajju Shyam and Durga Bai, three of the finest living artists of the Gond tradition, The Night Life of Trees is a tribute to the majesty of trees, and to old ways of relating to the natural world. Each painting is accompanied by its own poetic tale, myth or lore – narrated by the artists themselves recreating the familiarity and awe with which the Gond people view the cosmos.

Necklace: Tree of Life pendant from ccvalenzo on etsy. The shop carries the same tree image on pendants of different shapes and colors. I’m very tempted to pick up a black and white one.

Tree of Life pendant

1. One year we had four in three states. Sequentially, not simultaneously. [↩]
2. In studying library and information science, I have learned it will actually get you cited a lot if you make up new words. [↩]
3. the one on which a barred owl perched and stared me down while being pecked by mockingbirds [↩]
4. I have taken to saying this a lot in the past year, usually with a smile, and always thinking about the linked story. [↩]

…I will collect images of things instead of purchasing them. All from Etsy. Click image if you want to see the item page.

Titanium ring with leopard skin jasper stone inlay

Interesting Square Neckline Linen Dress

Slumber of the Cicada, original painting

Set of Four Rice Bowls - Iron Red

Missing You shirt

Giant Black Batwing Ciacada

Bobcat skull w/shamanic ornamentation

Red Bodhi Original Oil Painting