Today we all receive the gift of seeing outward from the heart of the tree, seeing out through wood to the system of veins in mid-air.

Each person around the world–in the deserts, in the cities–looks at a tree or a plant or a weed, and meditates.  We graft the tree and human worlds together: we breathe in rhythm, we pour the energy of our minds into your growth, and you increase, your leaves get shinier.  Our skin and your bark, our arms and your limbs, our hearts and your tender unseen pith, there in the holy of holies.

How often your leaves and flowers have been braided into our hair; they’ve crowned our wrestlers and poets and our best charioteers.

How often we’ve walked the trails just looking at you.  That was our day’s entertainment.  We’ve come to you churning with cortisol, made desolate by concrete, just to look peripherally at your green blur, and be with you in this moment.  It’s quiet here in the middle of your lives, on a typical day.  The sun heats the fallen pine needles…

But enough about us.

Today, like everyone, I see your xylem and phloem in the sky.  I feel your leaves on my face.  I sense the miles of roots under my feet though they rest on linoleum.

I see outward through wood, wild wood, in its natural state.

Beautiful tree, we’re so happy to welcome you.  The living room is covered with dirt and moss, twigs and acorns.  Welcome, welcome.  Can we get you anything?  Here’s a dish of rainwater.  Sit, I’ll put on the Nature Channel.

Long silence.

Just relax, sway gently.  Ah, sip that rainwater.  This is a caterpillar-free zone.

An hour for you.  A day for us.

A leaf is drifting down through the apartment air.

Long silence.

Tonight the darkness will be made of all your unified shadows, and I will fear nothing.

Before you leave, is there something of yours I can keep?  That fallen leaf–I tape it to the skin over my heart.  It decays.   So be it.  I wear the fragments.  I look at you, or your cousin, or your cousin’s cousin, and my heart, under the leaf mold, is restored.

Today is your day!  Haha!  You try to blow out the candles, but that stream of oxygen just makes them burn eternally!  Go with God, who also breathed directly into you.

The journey of decades always comes back to this little garden.  Three sons, they grow, move out, the grandkids…and each year, around this time, the Spring fully commits and he can venture out, sniff the air, and get his hands in the dirt.

The sun was setting each day slightly further to the right, until it reached the gray steeple, and sure enough the first snowdrops emerged.

The soil is still slightly cold. The interconnected roots welcome him back, sense his health, loop him in. 

He is part of the Spring.  Part of this angle of sun and length of day.  Generations of local birds have flown and hopped around him.

His wife watches from time to time, standing in the window…

Even she doesn’t know that, for a select few, soil can nourish the body, undo things like neuropathy, turn back time.

Kneeling on the ground, his neck growing red, he is the membrane between Spring and soil.  The sun, the water, the upward growth, pass through him.

The garden is renewed in a pulse of light.

And now for months it will be:  Dad’s outside.  Grandpa’s with his flowers.  Can you smell the flowers on Grandpa?

*

Lucky man, to live in the smell of hyacinth and woodbine.  To have grass-stained knees like a kid.  But there’s more.  The garden extends:

Six months ago, the seed catalogues started arriving.  In March, he took virtual classes and surfed the chatrooms.  Then it was regular visits to the nursery—that goldmine.

Now, like clockwork, his schedule’s changing, and so is his wife’s.

“I don’t feel like TV.  Let’s sit outside.”

“It’s warm enough.  Let’s eat outside.”

To be near the garden.

Who was that person?  What did it feel like to be him?  This I can’t say.

I can only give the perspective of the 4-year-old boy he held in his arms, and danced around to ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’.

There was death to come for him much later, and trauma for me in the next few years, trauma he softened by making me bacon and eggs, by hitting fly balls so I had to run and dive.

In this world, he sat in the diner, in a black mesh tank top and teal sweatpants, eating a toasted bran muffin with butter.

In the upper worlds, he fills a doorway with warmth and light, warmth and light pouring out.

You are what’s kept me going.  You are every positive word that comes out of my mouth.

The richness in this world–I saw it first on the top of your dresser:  brewer’s yeast, bee pollen pellets, fascinating rubbery vitamin E, iron, garlic…

You’re getting dressed in the late afternoon, to go into New York to the Academy, sweating a bit in your dress shirt.

Now you’re deep into Alzheimer’s, all your diplomas in a box.  I’m playing with your beautiful white hair.  Even then, with your barrel chest, you give me a bear hug.

Do you need anything now?  I doubt it.  But let me give anyway.  May all those hugs, and all those times I played with your hair, reach you in the upper worlds, a thousand times amplified.   So within God’s embrace, for a second, you smile a different smile.

The grass grows very green and thick; it pours from your grave.  Not surprising at all.