One Night

I worked my way around the small pond, pushing the willow branches into the soft, damp earth along the margins. The world around me had fallen silent-- muffled, perhaps, by the dew already settling on the grass. The stars shone clear high above, the silky wash of the Milky Way spanning the velvet dark; and as I finished up, my eye was caught by a sudden light to the east. It was the moon, heaving its luminous bulk over the horizon like a revelation. It hung there, unreasonably still, as if this waning gibbous moon longed to remain, to hold on to what light it had left. But incrementally, it lifted over the trees, accepting its nature and the changes of time. 

Soon my backpack full of fresh branches was emptied, and I took to roaming the night, glorying in what I had done, ignoring roads and property lines as I strode across the soaking fields and lawns. Boundaries of all kinds were falling away. All my usual reference points were gone, swallowed by the dark maw of night,  and elation surged in me, my awareness sharpened, expanding laterally. The world dissolved into a mysterious enormity which I drifted through, a singular point of perception made whole, and joining with the rest, as much as my feet were soaking in the chilly wetness, and my lungs the misty air. 

Something had transformed the trees. Trees that, by day, seemed isolated and dwarfed by the spaciousness of these open fields, a place that was, in fact, former forest, long ago bulldozed. Now, under the cover of night, they rose up before me, looming against the moonlight, phantom spirits of the forest this land, in its hidden heart, even yet remains, though long held down by the mowers. 

They seemed to rise, physical manifestations of the very night itself, the growing soul of darkness itself. But not darkness in any evil sense, no-- dark only in the way of things unknown, unfathomed, but very much alive. One pine, as I wandered free over those fields, seemed itself to walk towards me, though of course it was I who, by no design of mine, was steering straight for it. A large, two-trunked pine, feathering dark branches out against the star littered sky, each needle singular in its existence, glistening in the moon. It was a silhouette of pure presence. 

It seemed to hold a quiet wisdom, a strong sense of knowing, and as I drew nearer, even seemed to hold the moon itself between the tongs of its split trunk. A living memory, random remnant from a bulldozed wood, survivor of wild storms and man alike, standing quite alone in a vast sea of undeveloped property. This tree remembered a different owner, and this, I knew then, in a way I cannot quite recapture now, was the tree-lord of this patch of ground, one of the sovereign sentinels who wait, wait... wait for the day the mowers come no more, ready to tend a fresh growth of seedlings, the someday lords of a forest yet to be. 

Apple (part 3)

(This is part 3 of this story. Go here for part 1, and here for part 2)

The seed took root in the compost, and then the leaves stretched out.  Someone found it and transplanted it to the garden, and the years passed.  The first winter was hard on the tiny tree but it weathered it, and over the years slowly grew tall and fair.  One spring, the tree flowered for the first time, delicate white blossoms against the light green leaves.

Something foreign entered.  A few days later, something woke up.  I guess it was me, but I had no memory of anything; it was more like being born.  I went through the same motions as before, the questions, the endless nagging questions that demanded a search for answers.  Again I found the truth, again I ripened, again I was torn away, again I died, forgetting everything… and again I sprouted.  Things began to speed up, like a fast forward blur, generations of trees, from flower to apple to seedling to tree and back again repeated, the search for truth undertaken again and again, different each time, but always the same, over and over.  At some point I learned of other apples, each with their own seeds, and I found cuttings and grafts from other, unknown trees.  Together with these I traveled often, studying the tree and its growth history, learning how it worked.  From one another we learned many things.  Together we questioned the Mysteries.

One summer I, or some version of me, found myself lost in the maze of wood grain in an old knothole where a limb had been removed and a scar had formed.  I had realized, for the thirty-third time, that the tree exists to make me, but as far as I knew it was the first time.  Though happy as ever, something nagged at me; I wasn’t quite satisfied with the discovery this time, and was out exploring the particulars of my tree to pass the time.  Then, as I was just working my way out of the knothole, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a realization.  I don’t know where the thought came from, or what might have caused it to come to mind just then.  Like the rain when it starts falling, there didn’t seem to be a certain cause; it just happened, thanks to some mysterious combination in the clouds.  And often when you least expect it.

All this time exploring, noticing the vague familiarity of the tree, as if I’d been there, in this or that very spot before… the answer why finally opened itself up to me.  I had been wrong before; I’d had everything backwards.  The apple is not the sole purpose of the tree, but just the opposite— the tree is the purpose of the apple!  In some way the apple is the servant of the tree, perhaps containing the concentrated essences of it, but forever secondary to it. Apples, like the limb that had once grown from this spot, fell away, but the tree remained. 

            I considered further: no, that wasn’t quite it, not yet.  As I sat there dumbstruck by the ideas coming into my mind, I looked around at the wood around me, dead but healed, and felt the subtle pulse of the sap close by running through the living tree that wrapped around the lifeless center.  I knew high above leaves were making sugar, and far below roots were probing deeper, searching for water and nutrients.  I began to know things that I should by rights have had no way of knowing.

  This is where I’d come from.  What a fool I’d been, to think the tree was there simply to produce me.  How small to think I was there only to serve the tree.  I was the tree; I was an outgrowth of it.  The Source I’d searched so long for was everywhere around me, was me.

No longer was I enraptured by the selfish glory of being the sole purpose of the tree, a glory somewhat, but not completely, subdued by the fact that there were many other apples on the tree.  I realized that I was one with the tree, and that the apple is no more the purpose of it than the root hairs twenty feet underground were. But at the same time I could see I wasn’t just an afterthought, nor was I some sort of article of clothing, to be dropped whenever the tree was done with me.  The tree was its own purpose, and I was a part of that.  I began to sense that the tree had once been much smaller, and that as it had grown, I had grown with it; I had been there all along, reaching along it’s branches, stretching up with the trunk, digging with the roots, and moving between each and every cell with the flow of sap every spring and every fall.  This is where the sense of familiarity came from; I felt as if I’d been there before because I had been there, long ago, and because I was always there, as an integrated part of the greater organism.

When I fall in my apple, this tree will still be here, will go on making more apples in other seasons.  But, eventually I will sprout, and grow, and make apples of my own. 

Suddenly, with that thought, the confines of time and my understanding of it fell away, and in a way that was more like remembering than learning, I saw the generations that had preceded me.  I saw myself being born again and again, without ever really dying, only changing from seed to tree to seed.  The other trees were a part of me and I of them; through time in ancestry, through space in flowers, pollen, bees and grafts.  By seeding do we stretch apart like branches on a single tree, by pollen and graft we come together, like sap from disparate leaves meeting in the trunk in Autumn.

The Source is everywhere and nowhere, never and always.  I sat for a long time doing nothing, simply knowing these things.  After a time, I realized that I had to forsake my apple this year, and stay in the tree teaching the others this truth.  I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to claim another apple or if I’d be trapped forever in the tree and die at last, but the feeling was certain; others had to know.  Immediately I began making my way back to the outer branches. 

*     *     *

            “Well, that’s when I woke up.”  There was silence in the room for a long moment.  “What do you think it all means, doc?” Cory asked, fidgeting with the bottom edge of his shirt as he lay on the couch facing the bookshelf.  His throat was dry from his long monologue, and the air in the room felt somehow tense, full of the doctor’s thought.

            “I’ll be honest, it worries me,” he answered, after a time.  “There are threads of megalomania, a hint of a Jesus complex, and a strange fascination with death.  But most bothersome is the deep mistrust this hallucination speaks of; where your apple falls and is eaten over and over.  I wonder if your mother dropped you as an infant…” he mused, trailing off into a thoughtful silence.

“Well, no matter; there is certainly a deeper problem there, one we’ll have to discuss further, over many sessions.  In the meantime,” he said, reaching over to the table beside his chair, “I’m going to write you a prescription for some Toxiloft.  And perhaps for Poisonax too.  These will help you feel a lot better, and you’ll sleep better at night; deep and sound, and no more hallucinations.”

            “Are you sure that’s all it means?”

            “Of course, young man, of course.  I didn’t go to school for seven years and not learn a thing or two about dreams.  They are a specialty of mine, you know.”  The doctor glanced at his watch.  “Well, our time is over for today, I’ll see you next week.  Make sure your mother sends the session fee, that’s a good boy.  And get those prescriptions filled as soon as possible.”

            “Yes sir, thank you,” Cory said politely as he left.

Apple (part 2)

(This is part 2 of this story; for part 1, click here)

For a while, I just drifted aimlessly.  I eventually found myself in the heartwood, which I had not seen before.  So far during my journey, I had stayed just under the bark in the living tissue where the sap flows.  Now I went laterally, deeper, into the deadwood below.  I wandered through the empty cells, the old dead from many seasons passed, now only shells, mere scaffolding and support for the living tree.  There was a great deal of it, but little to see or find, and very dark.  A long time passed, until I realized I was moving steadily upward. 

I kept going, all the way to the top of the tree, returned to the living cambium, and then slipped into a leaf.  Never had I seen such light; the whole place was infused with it, saturated, far beyond the dimness I had known before in the apple-stem, and unfathomably brighter than the deadwood of the trunk where I’d been so long lost.  Here was an ocean of light, and I watched the chloroplasts in every cell swimming in it, making rapid circles, up and down, round and round.  I learned of air, coming up from little holes in the leaf's lower surface. It made the place very spacious-feeling, more than anywhere else I’d been, and the openness was very relaxing. 

Again came the uneasy sense of familiarity, a tip-of-the-tongue sort of feeling.  There was a diluted sweetness here, which I’d been tasting all along, and I realized that it was here in the leaf, in all the leaves, that it was being produced.  Yet it had been strongest in the apple where I had come from.  Then I was struck by an epiphany, my mind rocked by the realization.  This whole tree, every part, was there to make me!  The leaves to make the sugars from light and air, the roots to gather the water and minerals, the trunk and branches to convey both and hold the whole thing up; it was all there so it could make my apple!

I cannot remember ever having felt such happiness.  The relief of finally having my answer, the satisfaction of knowledge… it was indescribable.  I shot back to my long-abandoned apple, giggling with sheer delight.  I never stopped smiling, not for all the weeks it took for me to come fully into ripeness.  I was a beauty to behold, glorious and red with joyful life.  The masterpiece of the tree was I; me, the tree’s ultimate realization and purpose.

But then something terrible happened, incalculable in the horror it held for me.  A wind picked up, a violent storm, and my whole tree whipped and thrashed.  If I could have, I would have clung for dear life to my twig— but I fell.  The apple-stem broke and I dropped to the ground beside the road.  This was, I knew deep down, the beginning of the end.  A series of events completely beyond my accounting had been set into motion.

I found myself being lifted, and rubbed clean of the dust and mud I’d gathered on the ground.  The horror that followed I can hardly speak of.  I was being eaten.  If this was what the ripening had been all about, I wanted no part in it, and my despair was beyond telling.  I retreated back to the core and closed myself up inside a seed, shaking with fear.

The end did not come; my deepest fears were not realized.  I felt myself being thrown, sailing through the air, bouncing and tumbling and finally coming to a stop on a compost pile.  I came out of the seed and beheld the devastation: nearly the entire apple, my highest pride and joy, was demolished, gone.  So avid the man’s teeth had been in gnawing my beloved apple that several of the other seeds were missing, either fallen out or eaten.  I wept and retreated again into the seed.

It was to be my sad fate to watch the mold come; the same mold with which I had felt a warm, if somewhat distant, sense of connection to that time down in the root.  But now it was devouring the ruined remains of the apple, my apple, turning it into brown mush.  In two weeks nothing but my seed remained.  The seasons passed, grew colder, snows came and went. And then I died.  I felt a cracking sensation, as if my whole body was tearing apart. There was a splash of light, and then nothing.  I knew nothing more. 

Apple (part 1)

And now, for something completely different.

Certain to be my longest post ever, this is a story I wrote a while back. Since I'm not much in the writing mode of late, just to keep the blog active while I come back to myself, I thought I'd post it.

** ** ** ** **

Cory walked into the therapist’s office right on time, at exactly four o’clock. Saying hello to the doctor, already sitting in his armchair, he walked across to the new leather couch under the window and sat down. The leather was smooth and felt very cool at first, but soon warmed under his body.

He had been coming to therapy for a couple of months now. His mother felt her sixteen year old son odd, talking about unusual things and always full of strange ideas, and spending a lot of time alone, reading or just staring off into space. He had few friends and seemed to show no interest in normal boy stuff: cars, football. She worried about this, and so had signed him up for therapy, hoping that having him talk to a professional might straighten him out.

“How are you today, Cory,” asked the doctor, beginning the session.

“Not bad, I guess, thanks. How’re you?”

“Fine, fine.” He settled back in his high backed leather chair. “What would you like to talk about today?”

After a brief pause, he answered, “Well, last night I had a really weird dream. But it’s not like most dreams, where you forget them real quick. This one stuck, as clear now as when I was dreaming it last night.”

“Lay back and tell me about it. Every detail you can remember,” the doctor said, encouragingly. He was a Neo-Freudian, an expert at psychoanalysis and particularly interested in dreams. He picked up his pen and pad and waited.

* * *

I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when I suddenly woke up, except, I wasn’t me. I don’t know what I was, besides some kind of disembodied awareness or consciousness; a Mind. I was in a small dark place, a fleshy place, and I realized it was plant flesh. I somehow knew one thing, and one thing only. I was inside a tiny apple, barely formed, fresh from the flower.

Immediately, I was full of questions. “Who am I? Where did I come from? How did I get here?” I asked aloud to no one in particular. There was no one to answer, so I sat there, thinking. There was nothing else to do but wonder, nothing to think about besides what I was, where I came from, what I was here for. Alone in the dark asking questions to myself, they slowly coalesced to form one supreme Mystery, the answer to which would answer all lesser questions: “what is my Source?” I worried and puzzled over it for what seemed a long time. I began to intuit that the answers were not to be found where I was presently. I decided to leave on a foray, if I could, to try to learn some things, answers I hoped. I knew that if I stayed put, I would know no rest or peace.

I went out slowly through the end of the tiny apple, and found myself suddenly in a much smaller space, like a very narrow tunnel. It was far more constricting than the little bulge of the apple that I’d been used to, and I was seized by fear and uncertainty. I fled back and didn’t move for a long time, considering the tunnel of the stem from the far side of the tiny fruit.

But my questions gnawed at me, and I decided I had to give the stem another try. I moved across the apple, pausing briefly at the core in a sort of goodbye, then took up again my position at the beginning of the stem, steeling myself for leaving. Then slowly, I began to notice a strange sensation; the sensation of light bleeding through the stem. It was dim, and though it grew somewhat for a while, the stem remained rather dark. Still, in some way it gave me courage, and I steeled myself, and continued.

It was not nearly so terrible as I’d thought it would be; the stem was not very long, and soon met in a larger space with several other stems that led off in other directions. I considered them, but my interest ran towards the twig into… well, into something, I didn’t know what.

As I began moving along it, I noticed that something about this twig felt familiar, as if I’d been there before. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, and tried to put it out of my mind, though I was not able to forget it completely. I followed down through the twig for a while, then retraced my steps and went home to my apple for the night. The next day, as soon as the stem became light, I went out again, intending to go farther than before. I covered the now familiar twig much faster than yesterday, and began pushing forward into more unknown areas, following the gentle curves and bends. Again I reached a point where I felt satisfied for the day, and returned to the apple.

This went on for several days, until I had explored down almost to the trunk. At last I entered it, though not without noticing that I did not notice exactly when. It had been like this for days; I could never say just when a twig became a branch, or when a branch became a larger branch. It was like how one day you suddenly realize it’s Autumn; you can’t say just when it happened, but you know you’re in it. The air is cooler, the sky isn’t full of summer haze, and the leaves are beginning to look ready to fall; you don’t know how it happened, only that you’ve passed some sort of turning point which you didn’t know was there until you’d passed it. It was all very gradual, but the noticing was always sudden.

At around this time I stopped going back to the apple at night. Not only was night hard to sense under the thick bark, and not only was the distance getting farther every day, but the caution and fear I had felt were mostly gone. I felt safe, almost at home, in the branches and trunk, such that I could stay out and let the apple wait for later; there was no reason to keep going back.

Down the trunk I went, nearing and then passing the place where trunk becomes root. I paused, and went back, feeling I may be near the Source. But again there was no definite point where the division occurred, just a smooth, blurred transition from one to the other. This was not what I was looking for; my journey was not over.

So I continued down into the roots, still searching. Things began to narrow again, from taproot to branch root to rootlet. Again I found in every phase and every place some vague sense of familiarity, like déjà vu. I kept going, all the way down into the tiniest roots, pale and moist, then into a root hair, the smallest, narrowest place I’d ever been. There I felt hardly any boundary existed at all between the tree and what was outside of it, only the slightest film of a skin. I could sense water outside the root, water and clay and humus. I sensed also all manner of life, thousands of beings in the soil just outside, bacteria and fungi, insects and worms, all the soil dwellers.

I was fascinated but unsatisfied; these things were not my answer; though I felt a sense of connectedness to all of it— the creatures, the water, the grains of sand— they were not exactly the source I was looking for. I had gone from one extremity to another, and the answer remained unanswered. I began to work my way back upwards, at a loss, feeling I had failed.