Day: November 20, 2015

Deep in the woods, a tree house sitting up, quite proud, upright, clearly no longer in use. From a distance, I thought it might be a hunting stand, but as I got closer, I saw it was something else, a magical place for children to be themselves, find themselves, connect with nature and the animal world, and discover the awful and wondrous beauty of solitude.

I think of these children, up in the tree, no Facebook, no cell phone, no games on tablets. I don’t yearn for the old days, I do not emotionalize the past. Children today live richer and fuller lives than I could have imagined, holed up in my room with a small transistor radio and a few comic books.

Still, I feel for the children who will never know the treasures of the woods, the sweet awareness of being alone, the confidence of mastering the quiet and the dark. Here, they could sit quietly and watch the deer, the bear, the raccoon and squirrels, the chipmunks and mice, the coyotes and ferrets.

I imagine this was built by a father, his love and concern are written in every plank and roof tile. I wonder if he is gone, or if he ever comes back to see what he built.

They could scare each other with stories of the dark woods, the ghosts and animals and strange creatures who come alive in the dark. Perhaps they slept over often in the warm weather, tugging their flashlights or candles, their crayons and books, some sandwiches wrapped in wax paper carried from home with some potato chips and a pitcher of milk.

They might have climbed down to swim in the pond, even to run to the farmhouse down the hill for some cookies or milk. At night, they might have pulled the ladder up, or closed the door. The children are long gone from this tree house, it was carefully and lovingly built. I imagine grown-ups were not allowed but friends came for sleepovers, or to spend lazy afternoons sitting up above the world,  soaking up the richness and teeming life of the forest.

I can hear their shrieks and shivers at the hooting of the owl, the eyes of the deer reflecting the moon at night, the howls of the coyote and rumbles of the black bears. Hugging each other, lying still, wishing for Mom and Dad, but refusing to go to them And in the morning, in the light, the forest is silent, and all is well. Lessons of life.

I thought the tree house to be sad, perhaps missing those children, waiting for more. I think there will not be any more, going to tree houses is not what children do any more.  How can we respect the past without mourning it, without wallowing in it? Nostalgia is a trap.

But the tree house is a ghostly spirit out in the woods, it speaks to us of a simpler life for children, a magical one, a safe world out in the deep woods, something many children today – and their parents – would find dangerous and unimaginable. I felt the energy of the Tree House today, I heard the children laughing, watching, listening, getting to know their own heads and minds, and I thought to say do not fear aloneness, it is a foundation of life, the garden of the soul. If we cannot be alone, we cannot ever know ourselves.

We can never really be with anyone.

I think that was the message of the Tree House for me. It sits deep in the forest,  high up, waiting. It whispers to me, they will come back. I will wait for them.

I have always understood the term “Tree Hugger” to be a derogatory term, it refers to passionate environmentalists who do not believe trees should be damaged or cut down. On TV, people make fun of “Tree Huggers” all the time, they are considered weird and loopy. I’ve never thought poorly of tree lovers, or spoken badly about them, but I can’t say I ever thought of myself in that way either.

I almost never am at ease on the extreme end of movements, life is filled with gray, black-and-white people make me nervous.

I married a variety of Tree Hugger. Maria doesn’t object to cutting all trees down, I don’t think (I’m not certain about this) but she loves trees, draws and weaves them into her art, and on more than one occasion, hugs them. She pays close attention to them, they are important to her. She rarely hugs a tree in front of me, it usually happens when she is out walking in the woods with Fate.

I think she was afraid I might scoff at her. Perhaps at one time, I might have.

This morning, we were walking and Maria went up to a big and beautiful old tree and said she wanted to hug it. She didn’t want me photographing it, she was afraid, I could see, that I might make fun of her. I was pleased she was willing to do it in front of me but I had to reassure her that I wouldn’t mock her.  Actually, I thought it was a very beautiful thing to see. This tree is full of life and memory, a beautiful thing.

I love her for her somewhat witchy love of nature.

I watched while she went up to the tree and Fate stood by. I asked her if she minded if I hugged it, and somewhat surprised, she said sure. I went and hugged the tree. I felt a great rush of feeling and affection for this big and beautiful thing, reaching up to the sky, so rich in history and place. So full of life. I  wrapped my arms around this tree, held it tightly, closed my eyes.

I have come to understand that in our topsy-turvy world, we often deride the very people we ought to be listening too, while we put idiots and peckerheads and potbangers on television and in Congress and public offices all of the time. Why, I wonder, do we do this? The raving lunatics get to run for President, the people who love trees scrounge for food.

Maria and I had a discussion after lunch about whether we really are pure Tree Huggers. We both have hugged trees now – today was my first, but not the last – but we do believe some trees need to be harvested for wood and other uses. So I guess we are not literally Tree Huggers, except that we have taken recently to hugging trees.

Labels can be traps.

Still, this reminds me once more to be careful about the people our greedy and angry culture trivializes. The Tree Huggers are the people who ought to be on television, the so-called sane and rational ones telling us what to think and believe are destroying the world.

If felt great to hug the tree, warm and I could feel this amazing energy emanating from it, this wonderful and proud old thing. I felt nourished and enriched. I walked up the slope to Maria and she gave me a big hug. “I am a Tree Hugger now,” I said, and proud of it.

Last Christmas, I gave Maria a new Iphone as a gift, she needed it for the videos and photos she had begun to take so skillfully. She burst into tears, upset, almost traumatized. I had never seen anyone get so upset by a Christmas gift, I knew it was something much deeper than the present.

I  was shocked by it, but I wanted to try to understand it better. She couldn’t really explain it herself, other than to see she really suffered on Christmas. She never felt more invisible or lost.  The holidays are especially charged for her, as they are for many people. The mere mention of Christmas can be disturbing for her. If you believe in Post-Traumatic Stress – I do – there were all of the symptoms. She was shaken all day, unable to eat, it was a painful thing to see, let alone feel.

I did not want a Christmas gift to be a painful thing for  her.

Holidays are charged for me also. Except for my sister, whom I rarely see, my family is gone, dead or scattered or out of touch. My daughter is in New York City, and has a full and engaged life there.

Maria and I sometimes see ourselves as orphans, but also pilgrims. Mostly, we have left the past behind, but sometimes, the past does not wish to go. We are in a new world, building our own family, struggling to make sense of holidays and what they mean to us, past and present. Maria has told me more than once that if she had a choice, she would treat Christmas as any other day without work, a day of quiet, being with the animals, reading and talking, walking in the woods.

This week, the loud and greedy holiday drumbeats have begun, interrupted for a few days by the Paris tragedy and the political posturing that followed. Black Friday, the national all-in-one corporate holiday,  is upon us.  In the past few years, we let the holidays be about bargains and discounts for screens and gadgets, and most of us seem to love it. Sometimes I get angry about it. My family stole the meaning of the holidays first, and now Corporate America has bought the holidays wholesale and transformed them into a giant cash mob.

The children of today will have a curious sense of what the holidays mean, or perhaps once meant.

So I told Maria I had a long overdue revelation. Although she always insists I do not need to buy her presents, I explained to her that I do need to buy her presents. For one thing, she never buys herself anything that isn’t in a box at a thrift store. For another, she doesn’t think she deserves any.  I don’t need to go to excess, nor is there money for that. I don’t need to buy expensive things for  her, but I do need to think of her,  get her presents that are modest but thoughtful. That show I am thinking of her. Love is often about the small things, if we forget them, we will soon forget the big ones.

Maria is wearing one of my holiday gifts in this photo above.

I got her another this weekend. I reserved the Round House at Pompanuck Farm for five or six hours. I am giving her the gift of a silent meditation, just the two of us, maybe the dogs as well. We will bring some food, we will be together in  silence and absolute quiet. We’ll take some walks – Pompanuck is very beautiful surrounded by woods and trails – I’ll bring some earphones and listen to music, Maria will so some yoga.

I can’t speak for her, but I will think hard about my life, what I want from it, where I want it to go.

And we will experience our love for one another in the peace and quiet of solitude, away from the gadgets and devices and arguments and violence of the world. This is important for both of us, I think. I have always believed in order to have a good and meaningful life, I have to think about having a good and meaningful life. Maria is the same. I discovered this when I went upstate and bought a cabin and spent a year reading the journals of Thomas Merton and thinking about the rest of my life. It was the turning point of my life.

I am giving Maria another gift, I announced this morning. There will be no gifts on Christmas, it will be like any other day. We might go to a movie, or sit and read, or walk in the woods. We might visit friends or watch something from Netflix. We might do all of those things. But she will be known and understood and listened to, perhaps the greatest holiday gift anyone could give to one other. She gives me that gift every day.

Maria was so happy to hear about this gift, she beamed and smiled and thanked me, much more than she did for the Iphone. This gift made her happy.

I see now that we can never reclaim all those holidays of the past, we can’t rewrite them.

We long ago stopped blaming anybody for them, we are all doing our best.

We have to build our own holiday together, our families do not seem to have ever quite understood or accepted us. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way life breaks sometimes. But we don’t have to wallow on that old pain or re-create it thoughtlessly.  We don’t have to follow that great curse of families and do what is expected of us.

The people who might have understood this do not, and that is something we have accepted.

It’s ironic because Christmas is the only holiday my family, a Jewish family, ever celebrated. There was always something forced and excessive about it, as if the misery and pain of the year could be washed away with a hundred gifts in one day. So our Christmas will have but one big gift.

No gift, perhaps the biggest one of all.

Sometimes, sheepherding is a ballet, especially when you get to work with Red. He is professional, enthusiastic, almost ruthlessly efficient. I hope some of this is rubbing off on Fate, who studies Red as if she was a Biblical scholar.