Prisms and Timber ThinAugust 27, 2006 In some of my windows at Earthsprings, prisms hang, refracting light in colorful, moving patterns across the room. I keep the prisms there not only for their clarity and beauty, but because they continuously reveal to me one of the wisest things I know—that there are always many facets to everything, each one having its own beauty, its own way of showing the light, its own rightful place. Remembering that, on many occasions, has kept me relatively sane despite life’s paradoxes, ironies, and disappointments. I’m no Pollyanna, never have been. I was, from the time of my birth, thrust into difficult situations that would not resolve themselves by simplistic formulas. I was forced to realize that truth, like light through a prism, comes in refracted ways into this plane of reality. Things are not only what they appear to be from any one angle. Even seemingly bad things always have another side. If I remember to look, there’s always another way to see a situation, another meaning to discover, another person’s slant to consider, another truth—however contrary to my own—that’s valid. Knowing this presents another challenge, of course. Sometimes in trying to make a decision, I feel that because there are so many possible choices, each with its own benefits and difficulties, I can hardly choose at all. If I am willing, though, to remain open to newly revealed circumstances, I can always continue to make new choices. Even if I make a choice that turns sour, I can adjust to the moment and realize that what once was or once appeared to be a right and good choice has since become other than that, and I can choose again accordingly, dealing with the new set of circumstances that has evolved in the meantime forcing me to alter my opinion or my behavior. That does not necessarily mean, either, that the first choice should never have been made. It seems to me that having the ability to change one’s mind, the courage to alter with changing circumstances, is a positive skill and does not mean that one has no direction or no steadfastness. It means simply that any of us must check our compass from time to time, to see anew the lay of the land. Watching the sunlight coming through a prism today, making its way slowly across the floor, I know that the changing pattern of the light is not made so because the prism is faulty, or because light is unstable, or because the sun can’t be trusted because everything is not fixed in one place. The nature of reality is dynamic, changing, steadily reshaping itself. It is both a difficulty and a joy for me to live my life aware of
that, being in the moment. It is, I think, the very meaning of freedom
to
be unattached
to any notion of permanence. It is the best thing I know to be free
to ride on the currents of change as a hawk soars on the winds, adjusting
as it chooses
or as it must to go where it will or where it is taken willy-nilly
by
the sudden down drafts or unexpected gusts. I’m having to look at the many sides of my recent decision to thin the forest, to cut back many of the trees around the house because of the possibilities of forest fire or hurricane. It was not an easy decision to make. Actually I once swore I’d never do it again. It is a horrendous undertaking, while it is happening. One feels like the Destroyer incarnate, like Kali run amok, like the desolating terrorist one so greatly fears. The noise is awful, the giant machines leave the ground torn up in places, and limbs and debris are left scattered gruesomely everywhere. What’s the sense of that? But there is another side. I had to consider it. The health of the forest itself (I’ll say more about that momentarily), the danger of storm winds like those that ripped up several trees and threw them near my house in the last hurricane winds, the chance of forest fire with so much underbrush and the density the timber itself. I could lose the whole forest in one stroke if I did not make a choice to do something to protect myself and the land I love. I made a choice. I acted. Then I watched, participated, stood by as the loggers did their hot, dirty, damaging work. For a while it felt right, difficult as it was, and I made myself be brave. I knew that after the control burn that could follow the cutting, it would be better, be safer, be a healthier forest. I still think that. But after several weeks and changing circumstances, I made another choice. Three fourths of the way through the timber thin, I told the logging crew to stop. I had changed my mind. I didn’t like the way my requests were being ignored. I didn’t like the amount of thinning being done, despite my continued admonitions not to take so much and not to overrun this or that. Finally, after a tree nipped the corner of my house, after a skidder machine fell in the little septic tank behind the cottage, after two water lines were broken, after a picnic table was crippled, and after I lay awake all night in a chest-tightened fit of worry, I arose at dawn, met the crew at the gate, and altered course. “This part of the forest over here,” I said, “I’ve decided not to thin.” The big machines ground to a halt, the loggers looked at me in dismay, the chief forester shook his head in frustration. But I slept better that night. Now I sit respectfully before the inner prism of my mind, listening to all the voices, all the perspectives, all the facets of the situation, sounding off at once in my head and heart. “You should not have…” and “You did the right thing…” and “Why did you ever…” and “What will they think…” and “Who knows ???” The trick, as always, is remembering that all of these voices, all of these perspectives can be true at once, all must be endured, acknowledged, and, if possible, welcomed. That doesn’t mean guilting myself or excusing myself either. A prism lets the light come through, but other, solid, opaque objects do not; I think certain attitudes--like excuses and judgments and self-flagellation--are also opaque in that way; they don’t let the light through. So, today, I remind myself, “Let the light come in, let illumination in all its facets be present.” I must keep faith with my own good intent. I must not be too hard on myself or too self-congratulating or excusing either. And I must acknowledge both my ability to follow through when appropriate as well as to alter course when things change. My friend says to me, “It will be alright. It will be good.” And it will, eventually. But right now I feel a little bit like I did when I was giving birth. During that time, I could only be with the pressures and intensities of what was happening right then, moment by moment. There was no going back, and the way forward was through what is rightly called labor. The nurse’s cheerful voice encouraging me was helpful, but it was the gritty, sweat-drenched, inescapable necessity of doing what had to be done that mattered. It’s like that here now. I’m going through the rigors of cleaning up, putting things right, living with the situation until it gets better. And it will be better. That’s the good news. It will be. Already, with a new, more open perspective in the part of the forest that has been thinned, I can really see some of the big oaks and other trees that were so crowded by the overgrowth of pines that they couldn’t be appreciated. One day, I saw an osage orange, for example, that I didn’t know was even there. I can also better see the variety, the rolling hills, the little dips and swells, the washes and ridges of the land itself. I thought I knew this land very well. But now I see facets of it that I’ve never seen before. There will be much new and different and good. And much of the good of the old remains, even in the thinned part of the forest. The hawks still soar and sing, the crows, who have had a lot to fuss about, are still here. While the squirrels are just coming out of hiding and I haven’t seen any bunnies lately, the raccoon mother, with her two little babies, still terrorize the cats, and today I saw the sinuous track of a passing snake in the same dusty roadway over which the log trucks had passed. I am amazed to watch curious deer, mamas and babies, stepping delicately over fallen limbs and browning leaves and crisping pine needles, coming to see what’s happening. They are amazingly curious and seemingly unafraid. Their footprints are everywhere in the much disturbed sandy soil. Immediately, in the very wake of the big machines, they are out there, checking it all out. It’s as though someone has told them there will be more grass for them now that there will be more sunlight between the trees, and they are expectantly and eagerly ready to make new paths for themselves in the midst of what I, on the other hand, could easily feel is only a frustrating and frightening disturbance. But what of the trees themselves, you say? How do they feel? Well, I have to tell you a story about pruning. Years ago, when I lived in Southern California, my family had a small orchard and a large garden. I was especially proud of a peach tree that I had brought up from a seed. The tree flourished in the warm sun and the moist ocean air. Quickly it grew to a size to bear fruit. That first year of its fruiting, I watched with delight as pink blossoms covered the tree and hundreds of tiny peaches appeared on the branches. My neighbor, older and more experienced than I, came to look at the tree and informed me that I needed to pull off at least half of the little peaches. He said that doing so would allow the remaining fruit to grow bigger and, furthermore, it would keep the weight of all those peaches from breaking the limbs out of the tree. He told me also that every year after that, in the winter, I needed to prune the tree back by about one third of its growing size. Young, haughty, sure of myself, I told him that I would instead just trust Mother Nature, who had made peach trees to be as big as she wanted them to be and that she intended for them to have however many peaches the tree wanted to have. I said that I didn’t care if the peaches were small, I wasn’t going to sacrifice some for the benefit of others. Certainly I wasn’t going to prune the tree. Well, you can guess the result. Sure enough, the weight of all those peaches broke three big limbs out of the tree. It was all I could do to keep the tree from dying, and the tree was never the same again. After that, the act of pruning, which needless to say, I do every winter with fruit trees, berry vines, rose bushes, and other things, has become sacrament for me. As I cut away the dead limbs that have already borne fruit, as I cut back the overgrowth here and there, as I open up the middle of a tree so that it can get air and the limbs don’t rub together and become damaged, etc., I say sincere prayers to the tree or the plant, to Mother Nature, and to myself as caretaker of this bit of life. Furthermore, I think about what pruning I need to do within
myself--the pruning of my overgrown ego, the letting go of
the things that
are finished no matter
how much fruit they may have borne in the past, etc. I have
found this to be a holy exercise. I do it humbly, remembering
always
what happened
to that
peach
tree (and to my own ego) when I wasn’t willing to do my own share of
Mother Nature’s work in this way. I’m involved in a big pruning job at Earthsprings now. I know that it is for the good of the forest in the long run. Should there be a forest fire when there is so much fuel up in the trees, in the thick underbrush, or with so many young dead trees shaded out and fallen over into other trees, making easy bridges for fire to spread, it could be disastrous. Fire in these circumstances could actually kill all the trees, the whole forest, mine and the others around me, let alone what could happen to the buildings, to my house, to the Medicine Lodge, to the bunkhouse and the cottage. The water pump is run by electricity, and fire in the trees near the pump house would mean no water with which to fight the fire. Last year during the hurricane, several trees were blown down right near the house. Fortunately nothing fell on the house. We were lucky. Some fifty, sixty miles to the east, where the storm hit more directly, whole forests were leveled and hundreds of homes had trees tumbled into them. I have received a grant from the National Forest Service, my fence neighbor, to pay for the cost of a control burn after the thinning. This will not only protect my land and the national forest adjacent to me, but will help to clean up after the timber thin. Within a month after the control burn, new grass springs up richly, and you can’t tell the burn has occurred. So, I believed the thin was all for the best. I flagged the grandfather tree, the altar trees; pink plastic tape is draped here and there throughout the forest, saying “Not this one...” But the doing of this thing was hard, like the pruning or the pulling off of little peaches to allow the others to grow. I wept frequently over trees cut and bushes mashed in the process, just as I often weep inwardly over some ego sacrifice I have to make in order to be healthy and whole. Don Hirsch told me on the phone of a time that his young son had a cut in his face that had to be stitched up by a doctor; Don said that holding the screaming child down while the doctor worked, even though the child was begging Don to help him escape the needle, was terribly hard for Don to do, even though he knew it was the right thing to do. That’s a good metaphor for how I feel about this timber thin. It’s right, but it’s hard. Pruning, cutting back, sacrifice of the “overgrown” parts of consciousness--all this has a spiritual context, of course. It seems to me to apply to our national and global situation as well. We can all afford to cut back, prune away many things--pride, our over use of resources, etc. (Last week I traded in my old truck for a new little Subaru Outback that uses less than half as much gas. I have no idea how I’ll get by without that big truck’s hauling capacity, but, hey, I’m with it, politically correct...global warming, the economy, all that...I’m cutting back...Less is better...right?) Easy though it might be to generalize all these ideas of mine into political statements, this newsletter is to the Fellowship of Comparative Religion, a church, and I do believe and practice the separation of church and state. I will only say this. No matter what position one takes on global and environmental and political issues, it is important to remember to look at the other sides of every issue, to see the other faces of the prism. It is necessary that we take into account the other opinions and needs and experiences of those who disagree with us, even those who would criticize us, judge us, or do us harm. Friend and foe, liberal and conservative, passionate and passive, we are all in this together. Perhaps our world is in much the same position as I am in here, having to get down to the difficult, gritty, day by day work of sorting it all out, with hope in heart, experience in hand, and with a willingness to be open to change while being protective of the best of what has been, all without doing any more violence than necessary to that ever present “other sides of things.” Irony being what it often is, I could still have fire out here, or a tornado or hurricane, or a tree fall on the house. I didn’t cut all the trees back close to the house, even those close to the pump house, even ones I know I should have cut. Some of them spoke to me too loudly, too clearly that it would be wrong to do so, even if they do fall on the house later. Maybe I stopped too soon. Maybe I cut too much. Perhaps I reduced the risk, or perhaps I made it worse. Right now I don’t know. But whatever comes, I remain committed to my faith in that prism-teaching wisdom. I often have been told that when I am gone, they should put on my memorial marker, if ever there is one, “She liked to say, “Yes, that…and also…” There’s always more, another side. And I choose to care about that, even if it means admitting I might have been wrong. I close with a quotation from Frank Waters, from The Man Who Killed the Deer, about a tree being cut by a group of Native Americans.
I am here with the trees today, those still standing, portions of those that were cut. I am in ceremony myself. When I have done enough of my job to make things ready here, I will welcome you again at Earthsprings. Meantime, I ask your prayers for me, for Earthsprings, for the trees, for the other plants, for the wildlife, as for the global political many-faceted situation, and indeed for all Life. With love and respect, |