Trees who wait…

There is a kind of lull here, some of the trees are dropping leaves, the Chinese pistache trees planted almost 30 years ago.  I’ve just learned that the female trees have red berries that turn blue, and so the tree that was planted by birds or winds or serendipity at the edge of cottage deck is telling me of her nature…

deck pistacheberries

 

 

 

 

 

 

The leaves are almost gone, a short window of autumn…unless you pay attention to buckeye trees, here long before houses and human planted trees near front doors of green metal roofed abodes.  The buckeyes are the trees that are in a hurry to meet each new season, so they can slow way down and wait for the rest of us to catch up with them.

They lose their leaves half way through summer, and many people think they are dead (yes, I know I have written about this before in this 7-year almanac. It’s possible, almost necessary, to fall in love with trees over and over again.)

This place is full of nuance and life, change, mountain, sky, bigness and smallness and tree-friends that teach of letting go and waiting.

buckeyeball buckeyetree

__________________________________________________

Break open your personal self
to taste the story of the nutmeat soul.

These voices come from that
rattling against the outer shell.

The nut and the oil inside
have voices that can only be heard
with another kind of listening.

If it weren’t for the sweetness of the nut,
the inner talking, who would ever shake a walnut?

We listen to words
so we can silently
reach into the other.

Let the ear and mouth get quiet,
so this taste can come to the lip.

Too long we’ve been saying poetry,
talking discourses, explaining the mystery
outloud.  Let’s try a dumb experiment.

(from The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, new expanded edition 2004, originally published in 1995.)

Published by Elsah

artist

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