What the trees can't tell me

They can't tell me what to do.

To you, this no doubt seems to be a statement of the blindingly obvious, that trees can’t tell me what to do. That, however, may be because you don’t believe that trees can tell me anything at all.

But they can. They can tell me that one can flourish to old age despite many losses and many hardships; that one can be strange and eccentric and unconventional and still get by; that one cannot ignore the environment – it always matters, for good or ill; that sharing is a virtue; that a certain sort of hardness is a certain sort of kindness; that defence is very, very different from offense; that sometimes one does have to sink inwards and contain; that to be hollow is not to be empty.

They show me that choices are always circumscribed. All that stuff about nature and nurture, the acts of god, the weather and the unpredictable others – one can’t pretend that one is ever utterly free. Only radically free – free with roots, within the bounds of place and time.

What trees cannot say is “be a Druid” or “write a best-selling book about animal cultures” or “buy a pocket of woodland” or any of the things I might want them to say.

I want to be told, to be directed. I want a freedom that isn’t just rooted, but is chained, weighed down, by directives and diktats from “they who know”. I mean, how can anyone expect me to know what’s really, deeply in my heart? To know my soul’s desire and spirit’s yearning? I am so cut off from those parts of me. I am a hollow place.

Yes: back to the hollowness.

I was with the tree who gave me the hollow places message and I was asking why, why, why it, he, she, they can’t tell me what to do? No answer. Hollowness. And I remembered that feeling. From so young. Across three continents. In various homes and at various schools. I remembered running to the stable to curl up under Syringa’s manger. I wanted to get away from the fighting. I remembered getting in the car and turning the key, though I couldn’t drive, and the car, in gear, bouncing forward into the wall and stalling. I wanted to get away from the fighting. Reading and reading and writing and writing. I wanted to be in an imagined world away from the fighting and the fear and the unhappiness and the despair and the pain and the shame of it all. The shame of myself. My acts of cruelty when I sought to assert some form of control. The psychological torment in response. I remembered my guilt when everything was normal again and everyone was lovely and I was so lucky, with my pony and my cat and my big bright bedroom, and the black was swept aside and not spoken of and I felt bad, so bad, and ungrateful for still bearing the scars.

I thought of the stories I told myself about myself and about how I was never me, fat, useless, hairy me, but someone better and prettier and funnier and cleverer. I imagined being a person with potential… but the stories ended tragically. Even in imagination, I could not sustain the joy.

I thought of my anger and confusion. My loneliness. That ever unmet yearning for connection.

And I cried.

It was then that the tree said, “What would you do or want to do if you weren’t always doing or trying to do all the things that you think might ease the pain?”

What would I do or want to do if I was not in pain? What would I do or want to do if I was not running away from the pain?

I have absolutely no idea.

My life is ordered to give me space and time to do the things that I think will make the days bearable, by easing the pain or allowing me to forget the pain. Everything I do is conceived of, chosen, for its analgesic or amnesiac effect. I can’t consider anything without considering if it will ease the pain, fill the holes, colour in the blackness. Everything is done for this purpose only. And I have no idea what it would be like to want something without the pain being part of what motivates the want.

Perhaps I would want to do what I already do.

Perhaps I would want to do nothing.

Perhaps I would sleep. Switch off. Die.

I wrote about Shakespeare and Spenser once that when they found the image that summed up what mattered… or what meaning was… or what being meant to them… once they had that image they could stop writing and, soon after, stop living.

Perhaps if you find the thing that heals you, there is nothing else to live for.

Perhaps if I were not hollow, I would not be alive.