Climbing the Naked Tree

I climbed the Naked Tree today: my favorite tree in the world. The sun is warm, the breeze cool. The fields around the great tree are bright yellow mustard. The breeze makes the mustard flowers move in swirling waves of unanimity. The Great Tree is suffused with strength: about 50 to 60 feet tall and utterly massive: its great gray truck splaying out in 10 different directions about 25 feet above the ground, then stretching outward and up, licking up sunshine, drinking wind with eager leaves.

I pressed my body against the huge trunk and felt its silent strength in stark contrast to its lithe, trembling twigs and clattering leaves all around me. Suddenly it was so clear: this Great Tree and its lessons; the wind whistling its counsel of radical forgiveness and release; the sweet burble of birds in natural song; and the silent earth beneath, resting in its massive weight, alive with glory-making fecundity.

Life… the great mystery, the supreme teacher, the Living beauty, the spontaneous happening just beyond the sphere of ideas and words. Why have we required more than this? I sensed in a moment of innocent clarity that we really can return to Paradise here in this world… that the fiery sword is not that horriid a fate to face and pass through: that it only kills bondage, that it only melts duality, that it only slays fear.


To hear poem: The Ecstasy of Trees

THE SECRET LIFE OF BIRDS

How do we know that birds aren’t singing with bubbling gurgles of joy warbling and trembling inside their bodies? How do we know that their little energetic systems aren’t alive and luminous with the ripples and cadence of song? How do we know that when they can’t contain it any more—because the ecstasy is so great—that they don’t dive and dip out of the trees or off of wires to soar?

How do we know they are not blithe and happy as they eat seeds by the road? How do we know that the robin isn’t perpetually cheerful because it savors the sensation of a worm wiggling down its throat into its belly? How do we know birds are not savoring the warmth of soft nests amongst twigs as snow falls on feathers? We who filter out Life with our bodies and left lob limited brains: how do we know anything?

How does a bird feel when it makes love: when feathers part and soft tissues touch? Is the ecstasy so filled with Light that their body feels like it flies with its wings folded? And does a bird know pain that drains its brain and flutters its body out to the edge of extinction as its orifice stretches thin, budging open to expel an egg?

And how do we know that birds do not grieve in song when they see their brothers or sisters in peril: when the cat pounces or shots ring? How do we know that when a bird friend falls and its eyes darken a black stone doesn’t weigh their hearts down so heavily that it strains their wing bones and feathers?

We who filter out oceans of brimming Life with our biological brains, we who dumb down and dampen our senses so we can darken and immure ourselves in abstract thought symbols, the supposed and seditious security of familiar emotions and endless chatter of words — how do we know anything real at all?