Fourth night: Generations in boughs

7:30pm

Got to sit in the tree tonight, my husband in with the little ones.

Overcast but bright sky, with mist hovering at the treetops.  Raindrops from today's many showers still clinging to branches here and there.  Walking past the apple tree, saw the scattered pink and white blossoms blessing its craggy bare branches.

The hens were unusually soggy from the rain, with mud up their legs from scratching in the newly-tilled garden.

Picked up pieces of trash under the tree's branches.  The pine I sit in grows in a small forest with several other grand pines, on land that other members of our family hold title to but share with us.  Over time, they have made use of this area in their own way.  Some trees have come down, several of  my pine's branches were cut to make room for a large portable garage that now sits about ten feet from the base of the tree, and in addition to the blackberry brambles, an off-duty snowplow now rests directly under the branch I sit on.  The original forest floor under half of my tree has been covered with fill and gravel that were brought in to level out the land for the portable garage.  This forest that is precious and sacred to me is simply usable land for others.  I fret sometimes to think that they may at some point find it necessary to cut off the branch I sit on, but I am reluctant to divulge my secret spot to them.  I covet the privacy I can eke out, living in such proximity to so many of...well...us.

Robins were cheeriup, cheerio'ing tonight.  Mourning doves changed branches above me as I approached the tree, but didn't fly away when I ascended.  A few minutes later, other doves cooed from across the yard. Someone else sang a chippy song, I don't know who.

The air was still during my sit, but for one lone breeze that timidly crept through the pine, sending a few branches swaying.  Water dripped from the branches now and then, and a few raindrops gleamed as they clung to the elbows of the twigs.

A four-wheeler buzzed through the forest on the other side of the street. 

There is a little maple whose growth I have been witnessing over the past few springs during the Sit Spot Challenge.  One of its limbs extends directly into the center of my pine's seven great trunks, reaching for the sunlight it knows is beyond them.  This tender little branch, no thicker than my pinky, is sporting new little shoots a couple of inches long now, adorned in half-dollar-sized maple leaves, their surfaces all wrinkly and delicate as a newborn baby's skin.  It is like a young parent, someone's teenaged child who has miraculously transformed into a parent, with its own little universe of leaves it has been nurturing.  And the limb this teenager grows from?  A grandparent now?

Trees are an embodiment of hundreds of living generations, each bough begetting the next generation, and so on.  So much like us animals in their regeneration, and yet the trees, the blessed trees, they get to stick around for the young ones!  They get to be there for their grandchildren, their great-grand-children, their many-times-over great grandchildren.  The grand-folk of every past generation remain, supporting the young.

Does this account for the generosity, the wisdom of trees?  For the gifts they offer us in the form of comfort and guidance when we let go, when we lean back on their rough bark and just listen?

I was lost in thought for much of my sit today, and found, on my way back across the yard to the house, that a sense of panic was rising in my throat.  I had not settled into the out-of-doors yet, had not tasted the sweetness of listening/smelling/sensing/seeing all of the delicacies that the evening had to offer, and I felt desperate to do so.  I watched this feeling.  I wrote in an earlier post that I have become familiar with many of my emotions and reactions during my sits, but this was a new one.  There are always many times during Sit Spot Challenges when I barely manage to be aware for one full minute during my 20-minute sits, but I don't remember ever having this keen a reaction.