Trees

I’ve spent a number of weekends this summer in the forests of our Colorado mountains, hiking about, reading poetry, and thinking about the Milky Way. Maybe it’s been the looming fear of our own mortality with COVID, or perhaps it is the way things have a habit of showing up everywhere once you’ve just discovered them somewhere, but I began to regularly see fallen pine trees who were gently releasing themselves back into the soil, nestling into the forest mulch like a skeletal shipwreck becoming part of the seabed itself. They were transmuting themselves from dead into alive, from tree into soil, from vertical into horizontal as they crumbled and decayed into hundreds of richly-colored caramel pieces of wood until only the long, stretching silhouette of the trunk remained, a faint outline of what once was, and what will be again.

Trees are so brave in how still they stand when the storms come, so patient in their faith that a flowering spring follows every denuding winter, and so dignified in their surrendering back into the earth when they know it’s their time.