Beneath Giants

This giant totara stands across the road from our house,
on a public reserve.  Matt put this swing
up recently and despite being winter
it's attracted so much play already -
teenagers, kids - me with my daydreams
who knows who else.   

The girls and I have played under some truly magnificent trees in the last few weeks.  Standing in the scrappy public reserve across the road from us, I've pretty much disdained them until recently - when they've taken on a new significance as play-places for the children.  Seeing them through the baby's dreamy skyward gaze, appreciating their swings and climbing qualities from Hannah's 3 1/2 year old perspective - I've become enamoured - taken over by the very concept of 'giant tree.'  Cathedrals, cantilevered masterpieces, anchors - giant trees exude metaphor and are charged with paradox.

Spreading and dominating, a great tree changes a space, asserting itself as a subterranean as well as aerial presence.  Sucking up nutrients and quelling undergrowth, it arrows through dirt and light alike with root-toes and leaf-lace.  Yet it also gathers, invites, permits - even submits.  Like a ewes tolerating her frantic lamb as it butts and pulls for milk, a great tree is willing, gracious - allowing the lovely and unlovely to seek life in its parameters. 

We only notice the life within a tree's ecosystem when we're present to see and hear it of course.  As we played around a great eucalyptus the other day - Hannah building up confidence on a rope swing and Lila and I dreaming - we started to see for ourselves that all was not quiet within the gum's circumference.  Fantails came and went.  A trio of rosella chattered and chased.  On the lower branches a leaf spun frantically - perhaps attached to a spider thread.  Then, crucially for me, a leaf fell, eddying slowly from the papery branch above, toward the steep bank below. 

It was one of those breath-taking moments when everything else falls away and yet seems to come together, making sense in some unspeakable way.  I became thankful - amazed - unspeakably more alive because of having witnessed that moment in time. 

To really see some piece of this unfolding universe - something that sprouted and grew, rustled, rubbed, heard the great whale creaks of its mother, all the while unnoticed by human eyes - is to really live. 

It's strange how often these moments of seeing, and hearing in nature, take hold of the sleeping part of my spirit and seize it awake, infusing energy that simmers for hours and days and sustains through other more mundane moments.

The rain falls outside now, another reminder to let go and be part of what is already happening - to let go of what preoccupies and remember my place - brother leaf, sister tree - within this wild and connected universe.  The clues are all around, whispering and tapping and falling in their particular wordless speech.