Trees in the Wind

The tall but half-grown gum tree outside the bathroom window gives me so much pleasure. On still, clear nights it sits with the moon about it like a Charles Long art nouveau painting. Today it was tearing itself apart in the wind like a teenager with a bad conscience. Tossing, not yet fully grown, so tormented and no one able to offer consolation.

Kate Llewellyn, The Waterlily

Pic by Miheco under a cc attrib/share alike licence

I remember that teenage space.  I still go there, into the illusion of separation.  I guess health issues that test your mettle do that to you, but there is always another opportunity to learn to resist that downward tug next time.  To ride the wave rather than getting sucked into its guts.  It is a paradox that you need to embrace and accept the entirety of the wave in order to be able to ride it.  Separating out the full embrace space from the getting sucked under space is one that is a little too nuanced to learn in teenaged years, but which even late bloomers such as myself are always capable of learning. 

Lots of people would like to return to their years of teenagerhood, but not me.  The hypocrisy of adults who have forgotten what it is like to be that age, whose eyes are covered over by jealousy so that all they see is your freedom and none of your torment?  Where they hold all the cards?  No thanking ye :)

It's been rather windy here lately.  I come home from being out in other places and small tree branches and bits of cast-off bark litter the road.  I read this portion of Kate Llewellyn late yesterday in the bathroom, the cold air breathing its way in through the cracked-open window.  It had calmed down from the day before, when the wind was strong enough to whistle through the window and the gums outside became potential housebreakers.  

I saw a picture the other day of a rainbow gum.  What an amazing-looking tree.  One of only four species of eucalypts that are not native to Australia.

I hugged a tree the other night, on the way home from singing along with other crones daggy songs from the 60's and 70's at the Caravan Club.  Though I don't like a whole stack of the songs we sing, the therapy from sitting in a room with a group of people whose sole intention is to get together and sing out loud makes me feel slightly heady.  I hugged the tree to bring me down to earth.  

Trees are people too :P Or they're something, anyway.  They communicate in some fashion with each other.  I wonder if they communicate with us?  It definitely feels like it to me.  But who knows. 

And I guess if trees are sentient beings, then teenagers must be as well :)