Hi, I’m Mike…I talk to trees

I was reading another one of Barbara Brown Taylor’s old sermons in Mixed Blessings where she mentions a friend that frequently talked to trees.   Ok, I admit it too.  Over a decade ago I was in the boot of Louisiana with 127 men on a men’s inter-generational retreat with Richard Rohr and Belden Lane.  The theme was The Stories that Make Us and trees were used all weekend as metaphors.  

On Saturday morning we were instructed to go out into the woods and find our tree, it was—we were told—looking for us too.  When we met, we were to tell our story to the tree.  On the way out to search for our tree we were given a little brown bag with the top folded over and stapled.  All we were told was after you’d told your story, open the bag and you’ll know what to do.

Beech tree

I had done some pretty strange things up to this point in my life.  Many years before when some guys died in a sweat lodge out west several of my friends asked if I had sweat with that guy (no).  But then what will people think about me headed out to the woods looking for my tree.  As things would have it, there was a big beech tree calling my name.  She rather stood out in this landscape similar to coastal Florida where it is predominantly pine forests.  I made my way through the brush—she did not happen to choose to plant herself on a convenient path.  What I noticed at first was the way the trunk flared at the base into what looked a lot like the feet of an elephant.  Unlike a pine which had no flaring, no ‘feet’, simply straight down into the earth, this tree was well grounded.  After a few minutes I made my way around the circumference of the tree which if my clone had been standing on the other side with arms outstretched, we could have barely touched fingers.

Beech tree leaves

As I got to the other side, there was a hollow in the tree at ground level and as the trunk came down on both sides of the hollow it looked like solid, strong legs with the elephant feet at the base.  But on the left ‘leg’ there was a deformation of the bark about 3 inches wide and 3 feet long—a wound.  I checked the whole tree trunk for a similar mark but there was none.  Beech trees tend to have pretty slick bark so the wound stood out.

A few weeks prior to this weekend I had the chance to read an advance copy of Ian Crons’ book, Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and me: A memoir of sorts.  The reading was haunting and yet therapeutic in that finally on page 199 I learned that his father too had been an NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder).  The resonance that I had felt as I read became clear.  But also I began to consider for the first time, that as difficult as it was to be the son of an NPD (one daughter has said children of NPDs are not afraid of going to hell because they’ve lived there), what would it have been like to be married to my dad?  As I read the book I thought of my mom.  Over the years, like Ian, I had wished several times that she would divorced him.  She, like many moms in such situations, co-opted in her first born son (enter me) to be her surrogate husband to a degree.  But, I at seventeen could not take the craziness of the family anymore and as my therapist told me years ago, I divorced my family.  I had met David who was to become my best friend the summer after our freshman year in High School.  His family, the Steeles, even to this day say they just ‘adopted’ me into their clan.  David had three sisters and two brothers so what’s one more? But my ‘divorce’ left mom and my younger brother in the madness at home.

Ian wrote about his own mom:

Our parents are mysteries to us.  No matter how close we think we are to them, we cannot know the content of their hearts.  We don’t know the disappointments, or the scars and regrets that wake them in the night, or the moments for which they wish they could get a do-over.  I’m not persuaded we should know them better than that.  In our therapeutic age, it’s commonly said that we’re only as sick as our secrets.  But there are secrets that should be kept only between God and our selves.  I don’t trust people who tell you everything.  They’re usually hiding something.

There’s plenty I don’t know about my mother.  She is rock and flower, steel and clouds.  She wasn’t a perfect parent, nor would she claim she was.  There were moments, however, when she was brilliant beyond words.

Reading Ian’s story my heart softened toward mom. I understood her a little more.  Her own parents had divorced when she was a teenager, she didn’t want to make that ‘wound’ generational.  My mom, Evelyn, was an intelligent woman.  Of his three daughters, my granddad Booher sent her to two years of business college after high school in the late 30s.  My paternal grandmother told me that the best thing that ever happened to my dad was meeting my mom.

Beech leaves

I know that in a mystical experience like talking with a beech tree we project a lot of what we bring onto the tree. (But then, why do we most often refer to trees in the feminine?)  Yes, the tree was mom.  The wounded bark on the left leg was the wound she bore throughout her lifetime.  But like that beech tree, she was strong.  Only a person like that could have endured what she did in her marriage.

So, I told mom what had happened since she had left—she had died Christmas-eve of 1991.  I filled her in on great-grandkids, one granddaughter named after her, Evie.   I told her about the life we had now after being married almost forty years.  Then I opened the bag to find bread and a small bottle of wine.  I proceeded to have communion with ‘mom’ that morning under her new-leaf shade.  I tore the bread, ate, gave her some.  I poured the wine on the wound and at her feet and then drank heartily of all that she has given me.

pine forest

Am I crazy?  If this is crazy, I hope so.  Believe me, I have seen real crazy—this is not.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning said ‘Earth’s crammed with heaven’ and her fellow poet Joyce Kilmer said ‘I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree’.  Nor shall I.  

Mom’s favorite color was green.  We had a green house, a green car and she often dressed me in green to the point years ago I went on a green fast.  I swore off anything green for years.  No longer.  

As I communed with her there in those Louisiana woods, she again bathed me in green.  And as creation reminds me every Spring greeing, life renews.  God will reclaim everything within me if I let Him.  Like Ian’s statement of his mother, I can say, “Mom was a rock and flower, steel and clouds—solid as a tree.”

However such weird, crazy things happens is not my concern—just that it happened at all is glorious.  Creation speaks to all of us all the time.  Springtime is a veritable symphony of revelation.  

I am one grateful guy for the promptings to look for—then listen to my tree.