Happy birthday, trees!

Yehuda Amichai, “A Pace Like That”​
I’m looking at the lemon tree I planted.
A year ago. I need a different pace, a slower one,
To observe the growth of its branches, its leaves as they open.
I want a pace like that.
Not like reading a newspaper
But the way a child learns to read,
Or the way you quietly decipher the inscription
On an ancient tombstone.
And what a Torah scroll takes an entire year to do
as it rolls its way from Genesis to the death of Moses,
I do each day in haste
or in sleepless nights, rolling over from side to side.
The longer you live, the more people there are
who comment on your actions. Like a worker
in a manhole: at the opening above him
people stand around giving free advice
and yelling instructions,
but he’s all alone down there in his depths.
​
“A Pace Like That” from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, copyright © 1996 by Yehuda Amichai. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press Books.
 
 
Joy Harjo, “Speaking Tree”
I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree.
--Sandra Cisneros
 
Some things on this earth are unspeakable:
Genealogy of the broken--
A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre,
Or the smell of coffee and no one there--
 
Some humans say trees are not sentient beings,
But they do not understand poetry--
 
Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by
Wind, or water music--
Or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft--
 
Now I am a woman longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth
Between sunrise and sunset--
 
I cannot walk through all realms--
I carry a yearning I cannot bear alone in the dark--
 
What shall I do with all this heartache?
 
The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway--
To the edge of the river of life, and drink--
 
I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:
 
Imagine what would it be like to dance close together
In this land of water and knowledge. . .
 
To drink deep what is undrinkable.

From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo. Used with permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
 
 
Danusha Laméris, “What Trees Dream Of”
This one thinks, let me be the slender bow
of the violin. Another, the body of the instrument,
burnished, the color of amber.
One imagines life as a narrow boat
crossing water,
a light mist of salt on the prow.
And still another— planed down to planks,
then hammered into shelter
toices vibrating through the rafters.
We do not notice their pleasure,
the slight hum of the banister
beneath our palms,
The satisfaction of the desk
as we tap our pens, impatiently,
upon its weathered surface.
They have ferried us
across rough seas
to lands that smelled of cinnamon
housed our senators,
who pace the creaky floors, debating,
carried arrowheads to pierce our enemies.
We have boiled their pulp, pressed it
into thin, white sheets of paper
on which we describe all of the above in great detail.
And when we die
they hold our empty forms
in bare cedar
until the moment—and how they long for this,
when we meet again in the blackened soil
and they take us back
in their embrace, carry us
up the length of their bodies
into the glittery, trembling movement of the leaves.

Danusha Laméris, “What Trees Dream Of” from The Moons of August. Copyright © 2014 by Danusha Laméris. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Autumn House Press, autumnhouse.org.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            The Jewish New Year of the Trees marks the revival of nature in Israel, falling on the Hebrew calendar somewhere between late January and early February. The reason I’ve chosen it for our focus this week—besides the fact that there ain’t too much happening in the long, cold soup of January—is because we would do well to take our cue from an ancient faith that has managed to enliven a holiday to match our current ecological crisis. To be clear, nobody said Tu Bishvat is a major Jewish holiday. The holiday has created an environmentalist buzz globally, adopted across the diaspora as a day of agricultural awareness and tree planting. The needs of our planet beg us all to resist capitalism’s extractive approach to the earth and rehabilitate our intimacy with and reverence for nature.
            These three tree poems offer a range of modes of imagining the interrelationship between humans and the natural sphere. Although Yehuda Amichai is perhaps the most celebrated Israeli poet globally, “A Pace Like That” is hardly the most obvious choice for a reverential poem about a tree. Its frank, un-precious style underscores that Amichai is very much a secular poet. Nature here provides a practical model for human behavior: the speaker simply wishes to mimic the slower pace of his lemon tree. But there’s a slip-slide between the sacred and the profane: trees model a way of being whose slow deliberation is likened to the care we take with sacred things. Not the perfunctory daily flip of the newspaper, but the deciphering of an inscription on a tombstone. Not the troubled movement of rolling from side to side in our sleep, but the deliberate slow unraveling of a Torah scroll over the course of a full year.
         Then Amichai flips the script with his final metonymic link: the secret underground force of renewal and vitality coursing through the tree’s roots is like… a worker in a manhole. He fuses the quotidian—the people above him who “stand around giving free advice / and yelling instructions”—with the profundity and solitude of the final line: “he’s all alone down there in his depths.” In a glorious upset of our expectations for attributing soul wisdom to natural forces, the mysterious workings of nature are compared to the methodical, practical, skilled industriousness of a manual laborer.
            Compare this way of modeling human behavior after the livelihood of a tree to the mutual push me/pull you of Joy Harjo’s “Speaking Tree.” To speak the language of tree (which for Harjo is related to poetic language) is to understand the longing not only to root down but also to move. To hear the singing of trees is to understand yearning. But the human “longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth” first appears as the inverse of what trees long for: “The deepest-rooted dream of a tree / is to walk.” This dream, as Harjo translates from tree speech, is to walk not as a human walks, but away from the human: “even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway— / to the edge of the river of life, and drink.” So the animism expressed here doesn’t show nature mirroring human emotion, but instead longing for independence from the realm of people to get closer to some primordial source. Unlike the human longing for tree-ness, conveyed in the epigraph quoting Cisneros—“I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree”—the trees dream of dancing with one another: “Imagine what it would be like to dance close together.” Free. 
            According to Danusha Laméris, trees dream of something different. “What Trees Dream Of” is the very opposite of Harjo’s animism, where the natural realm craves its freedom from humanity. Laméris’ trees dream of nothing but humanity. They want to be our musical instruments, our boats, the beams that construct our shelter. The desk is satisfied with our tapping pens, the banister loves our sliding palms. In the form of benevolent protectors, they ferry us around and provide the material on which we write our histories. This comforting view of parentified nature reaches its apex in the poem’s glorious ending, about endings. Trees, in their afterlife as coffins, embrace the human corpse until there’s an elemental co-mingling: “and how they long for this, / when we meet again in the blackened soil.” These lines bring humanity into a deeply corporeal union with nature that is also transcendent, as the trees take us back, embrace us, and “carry us / up the length of their bodies / into the glittery, trembling movement of the leaves.” Here in the dead of winter, I like this tree dream of becoming a kind of posthumous human humus.
 
 
PRACTICE
            Perhaps to find our own animistic intimacy with the natural surround, we could revisit our broken genealogies for older ritual systems that regard trees with reverence. Are there approaches to trees as bearers of the numinous? Tree ceremonies for quarrel settling. Divining rods. Hearts planted in acorns. Griots in baobabs. The shunned oak. Perhaps we could all dip into a little research on how animism shows up in our ancestral histories and devise our own tree ritual this week!
          Alternately, you might revisit your personal history and call to mind your very favorite tree. What were the contours of your relationship to it? The birch tree grown from the spot you buried your first dog denotes one set of relational properties and powers, the huge pine whose branches held the tire swing another. Still another set of powers are to be found in the protective dark of the Japanese maple screening your windows from the world. Whatever you value in and draw from your tree friend is a good place to begin building your personal version of the numinous. In meditating on this, you could jot down a word description of the tree, or write your tree’s history, or a fairy tale where the tree is the protagonist.
         Or perhaps try to embody this tree, envisioning the central axis of your trunk, the rising sap, the symmetrical explosion of roots below and branches above. If you were to breathe like a tree, would you inhale from the foundation of the body that’s rooted to the ground, upward to the glittery, trembling leaves of uplifted fingertips, with the exhalation drifting down all around you? Or would the inhale pull from the skin of the scalp to feed some central ring deep in your trunk and then radiate out in every direction? 
         Whichever exercise helps you concretize what you value in nature, what would integrating those needs into your daily life look like, and how can you commit to establishing a practice around it?