I love Shel Silverstein. I have never wanted to punch a character in a story more than the boy in his book, “The Giving Tree.” (as he gets older, not when he was a kid). I had a hard time reading it to the girls because the boy just takes and takes and blows off the tree, and never gets it. My blood is boiling a bit now just thinking about it. But Silverstein couldn’t describe humankind in our time any better.
I aspire to a more complementary relationship to the trees in my life (I get the irony of having a wooden skateboard in the photo). Over the past several years, a particular tree stands out. It’s an Osage Orange tree on the shoreline of the Oxford Cemetery. I have made a point of sitting under it for some time now.
Of late, rest has been hard to come by. At lease the right kind of rest. Rest, for me, is about tuning out the constant demands of what is coming up, and being completely in the moment. It’s when time doesn’t matter and actually passes differently. It’s not the kind of rest that comes from sitting on a couch or sleeping at night. Frequently, it comes from being outside–hiking, walking, skateboarding, reading, bird watching, exploring, kayaking, paddleboarding, reading or writing. I haven’t had enough of that time, those moments lately, and I can tell.
When I rest is when I am open to wonder. When I rest, gratitude overflows–in part because I am not rushing to the next thing. I am not in a hurry.
Thursday morning, I fought the pull of the couch and hit Oxford Conservation Park with longboard, binoculars, and notebook. “Skatebirding” has become a new favorite thing to do. I skated to the cemetery and pulled up under my “Sitting Tree.”
Double-drop longboards make for great birding seats. As I sat to clear my head, think, pray, and take in the morning, a raft of ducks was just off the shore. Watching them move about as a group, they were doing what ducks do. And what is it that people do in that way? What is it that is natural to us, that puts us in a place of doing what we should be doing?
Beyond Mallards, Canvasbacks, and Wood Ducks, I don’t know all the duck types around by first sight. Watching them and checking Cornell’s Merlin App, I pegged them as Ruddy Ducks, but pinged a birding expert friend to make sure. As I watched them, time moved differently. A solo Bufflehead swam up to the Ruddies a couple times, thinking they were his peeps, and then both times flew away skimming the water in a hurry when he realized they weren’t.
It was the tree, the ducks, the cove, the breeze, the sunrise, the shoreline, and I got to be a part of it. Sitting there, gratitude and joy welled up and started coming out of my eyes. I know I can’t communicate it, but maybe you’ve had moments like that.
Skating back to the conservation park, I wanted to write all this down–something I haven’t been doing enough of except chicken scratch in notebooks.
We’re looking headlong into the holidays. It’s a busy time of year, it’s nighttime dark at 5:30pm and it’s getting colder. Mornings like yesterday remind me that I need to rest. And to rest, I need to get outside. The Sitting Tree is still there. Where am I?