Balance. Walking the thin line into the future, unseen, unheard. The clouds may be breaking but still all I can see ahead is fog. I’ve been told that the future looks amazing. I don’t see it. I don’t see anything. If I look up I can see that the clouds are breaking, but I know about clouds. Nebulous things, they are siblings to the fog. They can regroup in a minute. They can fall to earth and drag me down with them. If I look up at the clouds, I will lose my balance.
Step out, he says. Forward. Direct. No walking a tightrope here. A reminder that I don’t need to put one foot literally in front of the other. A sure way to fall. Simply step. Be fluid. Move. Keep the weight in the positive leg, rooted, let the stepping leg loosen, and move, and allow the weight to shift.
It makes sense when I watch him do it. It doesn’t make sense when I watch someone else do it. In the one I see flow. In the other I see containment and control. I have been brought up to containment and control…and I yearn for flux and flow. Tired of being constrained, I want to be quicksilver.
Then I learn. Metal is not one of my elements. My fixed element is wood, and my mutable element is water. Wood water. Water feeding wood. Sap rising. Growth. I understand now, why the trees I love most are not the ones who shelter us with their strength, but those whose fluid growth shows in their bones.
There is a fallen tree in the woods where I walk. When I try to describe this tree, I have to take my hand away from the keyboard to describe its shape in the air. Wood, and dead wood at that, but it is supple and smile-making. It reminds me of the Naga serpents that you see at the gateways of eastern temples…or maybe a dragon, caught mid-snap, struck down by some guardian god of the woods, because dragons breathe fire and…so.
Sometimes I think of it as an abstract art installation. Part of this woodland is university estate. There are sculptures.
Sometimes it is just a fallen tree.
I love the trees that dance: the willow and the birch. The way they twist and arch their branches. And of course I love any tree that chooses to root itself in ooze…clinging to the river bank long enough, strong enough, knowing – do they know I wonder? – that sooner or later they will lose that grip, the water that feeds them is washing away their foundations – they stretch their roots deeper, further into the bank, knitting a lattice, a web, a holdfast – but the water washes, and it is not possible for even the strongest roots to hold tight to the air.
They lean further out over the water. I wonder what a time-lapse film of such a tree would look like if we could take its whole life from seedling through reaching out over the water to the point where it crashes down, or finds support on a fellow from the opposite bank, fighting the same fight, the Lady allowing them to meet mid-stream, mid-air, and catch, an imperfect arch, a scruffy bridge for the smallest of scurrying things maybe. I wonder what that film would look like, speeded up.
Would we see the root-nets as desperate hands clinging, flexing, trying for life to hold on…or are the trees more zen than that? I wonder.
~ / ~
In the heronry, the hollows are filling with water, and where the beech grow and drop their copper coin to the collection plate, mosaics emerge. Abstracts like some modernist stained-glass window. The bare dark branches, reflected, stand in for lead, the still green-held leaves form a backdrop, lit from behind, by light that doesn’t come from the depths of the water as it seems. Strange windows these that you cannot see through, that are lit from this side, not the other. The gold and bronze, the bounty of a year that cannot be spent, floating.
Tiger colours of black and brown and gold, floating on the water, backdropped by reflected woodland.
As humans we are programmed to seek patterns. We will find them where they do not exist. We will make connections between the stars in the sky by drawing lines as if they were diamonds on a cloth, rather than massive broiling suns millions of light years apart in every dimension. No surprise then that we draw inferences from the patterns we see so much closer to home.
Synchronicity.
The tiger wants to be wild and free. That’s the first line of the relevant chapter in the book he lent me. Wild and free was my chosen mantra for the year just ending. Patterns. The words were written in the book years ago, and my mantra-year is coming to a close. There is no connection between the two, except the one I choose to make. It has meaning because I choose to let it.
Just as I choose to let the leaves on the water be an altar, or the fallen trunk be a Naga or a dragon.
I still have my doubts and confusions surrounding man’s search for meaning. I look out on starry nights at the millions of stars. Are there millions? Has anyone counted? I look out and wonder how many planets that represents (bearing in mind, I can only see a fraction of the sky in which we float). If only 1 percent of those stars had planets and only 1 percent of those planets were in the goldilocks zone for life, and only 1 percent of the goldilocks planets evolved life…what would it look like? Would it also look around its world and seek patterns and meaning?
Do the other species on our own planet do likewise? I know that some of the scientists decry what they call anthropomorphism: casting other sentient beings (or indeed possibly non-sentient ones – I’m not sure where that boundary lies) in human guise: believing that they feel as we do, think as we do. I don’t do that. I don’t think of trees as pseudo-people. I simply wonder what a tree feels and thinks, as a tree, whatever the tree-equivalent of thinking might be, if somehow that might be translatable into something I might be capable of grasping.
Then again…possibly I do think of trees not as pseudo-people, but as actual people. Tree people. I think of cat people and ant people and bird people and crocodile people and slug people and whale people and grub people and chimp people and fish people and plant people and fungi people and and and and…
I don’t ‘endow’ these beings with human characteristics from an anthropocentric viewpoint. Quite the reverse. I take the view that the human people are no different from all the others. We have become dominant (for a time, which too shall pass) but we are just another animal. We are human people. The human is what makes us different, the people is what makes us the same. The same as the trees and all the others. Part of the same interlinked system that we haven’t yet figured out how to care for.
Or have, somewhere along the way, forgotten how to care for.
~ / ~
Balance. That is what we have forgotten. I started by saying that if I look up at the clouds I will lose my balance. The truth is that if I only look down at ground level, I will forget that I need it. I think maybe we need to look up and feel the sway of the ground beneath us, maybe we need to look down and lose sight of the infinity that holds us, maybe we need to look ahead and simply accept that we cannot make out very much beyond the shifting mists of time – and then we simply need to take the next step forward.
