A handful of the random and a dash of trees.

 Last week was a nice week.  I finally feel truly settled in here, and know I am because Robert and I spent the weekend together driving back roads in our truck, hiking into little lakes, fishing, reading, kayaking, sipping iced tea and simply enjoying being together and being in love.  We’re still in love, you know?  Really in love.  We’ve been married for nine years but I still feel like I’m nineteen and seeing him for the first time, every single day.

Speaking of love, I am head-over-heels-rump-over-tea-kettle crazy for the woods.  Stark raving mad.  Cuckoo!  Berserkers for the forest.  I was like this last year, too.  If I see a big ponderosa pine tree, I have to hug it, or stop and gaze up at it, dumb in its marvelous presence.  I am filled with such deep appreciation.  Laying my palms against the trunk of a tree makes me feel close to God.  It’s like I’m completing a circuit, there with my feet on earth, my hands on a tree, the tree against the heavens.  It’s electric.  Sometimes it makes me cry, the very aliveness of it, the smallness and hugeness of it.

Tree jottings from this week past:  

When we live here, I am continually dwelling on the idea of trees, the very essence of them, I mean their steadfastness and nature of servitude.

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Why can’t people be more like trees?

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The forest is a boisterous place.  It’s often described as a bastion of quietude and peace but I should choose to more clearly define it as a place free of human racket.  Isn’t a respite from humanity what we are truly seeking when we go out into nature?  I write this from the loft deck at the cabin and all around me is bird racket, the various pitches and frequencies of buzzing bugs, a raven shouting at the wind and beating his wings on the thinness of air, the rapid fire rattle of chipmunks and squirrels, the watery sound of the tree tops surfing the breeze.  It is loud here.  There is sound swirling all around me, tinged and punctuated by the pizzicato of  many living things, but I am not made weary by it like I am the sounds of traffic or the spill and shrill of humans in conversation.  Here, in the forest, it is anything but quiet.

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This is mid-June.  I see and feel the forest cresting, reaching and stretching for the climax of full bloom.  The green is still fresh and new, rich with the effort of merit.  The trees don’t speak, but I know what they are saying, up there, up high, when they clap their leaves and chime their emotions under moon and sun.  I pin a bright badge of respect to the bark of every tree I pass.  Oh, good, tall, stalwart friends.

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Trees for president!

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A forest is a fortress, the very thing to hold me safely in.

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I’ll never get over the ways a ponderosa pine tree wraps its bark, branches and needles around the wavering curves of daylight.  A pondi is a wrangler of sunshine, a true cowboy of a tree, a tall stout thing that gentles the sky, draws it in, makes it into a brave partner and friend. In the kind and splaying hands of the pondi, the spirit of the sky is never broken.  Every needle is a fragrant feather, a remembrance of earth and stone, a glimmer of ground and a tiny defeat of gravity.  How I love the ponderosa pine.