Search Results for: Mother tree

I haven’t been in our back woods since the weeds grew taller than me, over growing the path this summer.

But this morning seemed like the perfect time to return, since the grasses are beginning to die back.  They were still way over my head, but not as thick and easy to push down under my feet.

The dogs ran head of me.  Gus didn’t pause going over the Gulley Bridge for the first time and tunneling thought the tall weeds.

We came to the little waterfall, with barely a trickle of water sliding down the rocks and sat on the bench by the stream.  Then I went to the place where last spring I took down the big metal tree stand that a hunter had put on our property without our permission.

The last thing I expected to see was the same Tree Stand back on the tree.

But there it was.

In the spring, when we first took the Tree Stand down and left it in the woods,  I learned from our neighbors and friends, who are hunters, that since it was put on our property without our permission, it essentially became ours.  It’s a small town and Jon had written about it on his blog, so I assumed whoever put the Tree Stand up  heard that we took it down and would come and get it. Or at least when they came back to hunt again and saw it lying on the ground they would take it away.

We even had one hunter knock on  our door saying he took the Tree Stand and apologized for putting it up. (Apparently there were two Tree Stands on the property)

When I saw the Tree Stand this morning, I felt my heart start to pound and a heat rise up in my body.   I was furious.

I texted Jon, who was on his way to the eye doctor, that the Tree Stand was back and I was going to take it down.  He said I could wait for him to come home and he’d help.

But I couldn’t wait.  I was like the mother who lifts up her car to save her kid who’s trapped underneath it.

I had done it once before,  I knew just how to take the Tree Stand down.

I called the dogs and walked quickly through the woods and back to the house.  I put the cable cutters and a knife in a bag, put the 16-foot aluminum extension ladder on my shoulder and called for Fate to come with me.

Once in the woods, I extended the ladder all the way and leaned it against the tree behind the Tree Stand.   I had the bag with the knife and the cable cutters on my should.  From the top of the ladder I called down to Fate and had her lie down between the tree and the ladder so she would be out of the way when the Tree Stand fell.

I snipped the cable which locked the Tree Stand to the tree and cut the ratchet straps with the knife.

The Tree Stand was an elaborate one.  At the top it had  a four-foot long metal seat with a cushion, surrounded on three sides by more metal with enough room for two men to sit and/or stand.  It was skirted with heavy camouflage material.  A long metal ladder led up to it.

The tree stand didn’t fall away from the tree when I released it.  I had to push it as I stood on the top of the ladder.  It took me a few tries before it toppled to the ground.  It was loud and heavy, but Fate didn’t move an inch, until I told her it was okay.

The Tree Stand was four separate pieces, held together by pins.   I used the cable cutters as a hammer to separate the sections, three four-foot pieces of ladder and the seat and it’s surrounds.

The seat area probably  weighed as much as me.  It was big and cumbersome.  So I rolled it head over heals, down the hill and through the woods, across the pastures through the gate and into the backyard.

As I made two more trips back into the woods to get the rest of the Tree Stand and my tools, my angry energy kept pace with me.

I thought of the anger that flared up in me two days ago, that anger of a life time of putting up with the sexist, verbal and emotional abuse of so many men.  And in protecting and defending my tree and my woods from this trespass, it was as if I was finally protecting and defending myself too.

And the action of doing it all, the spent energy was healing and empowering at the same time.

Back at the house, I took the seat and surround apart so  I could fit it into the hatchback of my Toyota Yaris.  I somehow got the whole Tree Stand in my car and took it to the dump.

When Jon got home we put Posted signs on the tree where the Tree Stand was and along the perimeter of the property.

I don’t have a problem with hunters, as long as they’re ethical.  And I know the signs won’t keep most of  them off our property.  But as I was hanging them,  I felt a little like Gus  when he lifted his leg and peed on the stone wall that is our property line.

I was being very clear about what’s mine and what can’t be done without my permission.

There are certain trees in the woods where I walk that I know better than others.  There’s something in them that calls out to me.  It’s usually something in their size or shape that pulls me.  One has a thick scar that reaches up from the ground to the highest branch.  One has an infinite well of water held in its trunk.  One is already dead, shedding its bark and hollowed out by woodpeckers and small animals who have made it their home.

I sit in the tree,  or one the ground leaning my back against its massive trunk.  Or I stand  on its roots  and wrap my arms around it.  I close my eyes and listen and feel.

I’ve come to believe that because trees take so long to grow, because they’re on a different time line than us, one that sometimes takes years for the smallest change to take place, that when I connect with them, I get to experience their reality of time.  That means for me, everything slows down.  I quickly drop out of my head and into my body.  Usually I feel it in the bottom of my belly.  As if somehow the tree empties me out and creates space inside of me.  I feel a vibration traveling up and down my legs.

My thoughts quiet.  Sometimes I get words or images, much like when I listen to the animals.

Sometime I just get still.

After this my walk is  different.  Moving slower, I’m more aware of what’s around me, what’s right in front of me.  And the prayer continues as I make my way home.

Because that’s what I’ve come to think of  what happens between me and the trees.  A prayer.

I was raised Catholic, but I never understood the concept of prayer.  When I was kid and  my family visited the cemetery where my grandmother was buried, after planting flowers, my mother (who is not religious)  would tell us to say a prayer.  I never knew what to say.  The only prayer I knew was The Lord’s Prayer and reciting it made no sense to me at all and it  had nothing to do with my grandmother.

I never understood how reciting a prayer after confession would absolve my sins.  And I never found comfort in the words.  They never had meaning for me.

So I always felt uncomfortable telling someone I’d pray for them when something bad happened.    Even the idea of sending love was tough for me.  I’d say it or write it, but I wasn’t actually doing anything more than that.

When I’d try to actually send the love, I’d see the word “Love”, big letters  floating in space.  And if I pictured it reaching the person, it would stop in front of them as if there was a wall between the word and them.

It was  just a word.

About a year ago, I decided to come up with an image, so that when I told someone I was sending love  I could actually do it.  In my mind, I pictured a  pink quilt, one that I made years ago and use myself.  I pictured the  quilt with wings  hovering in a void.  In a moment, I could send it off to the person I wanted to give my love and comfort.  Then I see the quilt flying across the void and to  the person.  When it reaches them, the quilt gently lands on them wrapping itself around them in a big warm hug.

So I sit with the trees and send out beautiful, comforting images and energy in the form of my pink, winged quilt.  And recently I’ve gotten into doing a  LovingKindness  meditation at different times for different reasons.

These are simple words that I make sense to me.  They bring me comfort and let me put comfort out into the world at the same time.

I guess, in my own way,  I’m learning how to pray.

I meant to sew some potholders today, but I got this idea for my quilt so started working on it instead.  There was a hole in the quilt, two squares worn all the way through, so I cut them out and they made a doorway.  Not sure what’s going to be in that doorway yet, but it gave me a place to begin and I built a room around it.

Here’s a close up.  I’m really drawn to how the patches of fabric and patterns show up against the stitching.  I’ll probably use some colored markers to make that stand out more, but want to leave a lot of it the way it is.

I stitched down my Snake Goddess and started to add designs to her.  They come from my Language of the Goddess book.

The last thing I did tonight was add a butterfly to the missing square of the flagmen.   The butterfly is from a wallhanging that Veronica sent me.  Her grandmother had made it and it has all these wonderful patches on it.  Like that little oriental rug under the butterfly.  Those flagmen have the feeling of flight.  And the butterfly seems to make it all make sense to me.

Here’s what it looked like when I left my studio tonight.

There was a full moon, but the night was also lit by the street lamps.  I was twenty six,  living in East Massapequa on Long Island and taking a walk to the bay at the end of my block with Lestat, my black doberman mix.  On the way back home the moon was on my right, it seemed to be shining on my face, it was if I could feel it’s heat on my cheek.  As I got closer to my house I realized I had been repeating the words The Moon is my Mother over and over to myself.   I had no idea where the words came from.  Later I made a found object sculpture using a blue and white speckled  enamel pot cover attached to an old piece of wood.  Around it, in rickrack, I wrote the words The Moon is my Mother.  The pot cover became a symbol for the moon, a breast, the feminine.

Yesterday I read the Sylvia Plath poem The Moon and The Yew Tree.  One of the lines in the poem is “The moon is my mother“.  I’m not aware of ever having read this poem before.  Maybe I did, sometime before I took that walk down to the bay in the moonlight and the forgotten words came back to me.  Or maybe the words are an archetypal truth.  Something each of us just innately know.

So there are some updates for the Mother’s Day Show at 70 Main Street in Greenwich NY.

It’s going to be one day only.  The show will be on Saturday May 12th from 10am-6pm.  There are 6 artists.  Nancy Bariluk-Smith, lampwork jewelry,  Judy Leon will have items made from her Alpaca wool, Robin Blackney-Carlson, felted scarves and handbags, Jane McMillan, pincushions and wallets, Kendra Farstad, (sorry, no photo yet)pastel landscapes, Chung-Ah Park, pottery, Jon Katz, notecards and I’ll have my potholders.   Susan Quillio will be there were homemade food and there will be live music throughout the day and a Farmers Market.

At 2pm Jon will be giving a talk on photography and seeking light and color in the world around as inspiration.

You can meet us artists throughout the day and Jon will be around to sign books too.

Fate and Zinnia run under the Japanese Honeysuckle ahead of me.  It’s the perfect height for them, but I’d have to crawl to get through it.  I’ve been ducking under that bush for years, it’s one of the archways that lead me further into the Orphaned Woods. But now it’s lower than usual.

When I get closer I see the dead branch that fell on top of the bush pushing it down.  It’s only as I reach to remove the branch that I see the robin’s nest and four bright blue eggs.

The blue is like neon among all the spring greens that color the woods.  I can’t take my eyes off them.  For the first time, I wonder why they are so blue.  Then I snap out of it.  The mother must be nearby, waiting for me to leave.  I take a picture and walk carefully around the bush.

That was a few days ago.

Today I’m laying on the couch spending my time reading and sleeping.  My stomach is queasy and I’m too tired to do much more than feed the animals and throw the fabric that Judy and Fran sent me into the washer and dryer.

I tell myself that if I rest today, I’ll feel better tomorrow.  And I believe it.

I’m halfway through Suzanne Simard’s book Finding The Mother Tree, Discovering The Wisdom Of The Forest.   It’s a memoir about Simard’s discoveries of how the trees in the forest are connected by a network of fungus that transport nutrients, minerals, and water between them.

I don’t get all the science, but I do get the essence of what she is writing about.

It’s because of this book that this year I planted the ten saplings that I got from The Arbor Day Society in the woods close to other trees instead of in a clearing as I’ve done in the past.

The place I chose for them is in a grove of young Hornbeam trees.  Their smooth bark is so like the stretched muscles of an athlete that they always seem to be in movement to me.  The soil beneath them is moist and rich.   I planted a couple of the seedlings in the humus of a fallen birch.

I never thought of how seedlings grow in the shade of the trees around them.  That they need sunlight, but not a pounding sun.  And now I know that the saplings have a better chance of surviving when their roots grow mycorrhizal fungus which connects them to the roots of other trees and helps nourish them and even find water under the ground.

It is this network of fungus that all those mushrooms that I found in the woods last year grow from.

As I lay on the couch, reading about the old-growth forests in the mountains of British Columbia, I’m thinking of the woods behind the farm.

Tomorrow when I’m feeling better and I’m watering the saplings I’ll be wondering if they’re growing that life giving fungus on the tips of their roots.  And I’ll be thinking about the world below my feet as well as the one above.