You may listen to this post read aloud by the author or you may read it for yourself below:
Last year I harvested crabapples from the tree in our front yard and made crabapple butter. There were so many crabapples they blanketed the yard, rotting and fermenting back into soil for months. This year, I kept watching the tree, waiting for the fruit to appear. It’s now the end of August and only a few stray crabapples have appeared.
Is the tree dying? I wonder, and turn to the interwebs.
Not producing fruit can be a sign of poor health in a tree. However, I also discover that some crabapple trees live in a fruiting biennial cycle. They produce heavily one year and not the next.
I’m no arborist, so I can’t say for sure why my specific tree isn’t producing this year, but my gut says it’s more likely the latter reason. I’ll find out if I’m correct next year.
Regardless, something about the fallow season of this tree speaks to me.
I’m so worn out this morning. Every time my son goes down for his nap I pick up this sense of urgency to do something meaningful. Get in a yoga session. Read a book. Journal. Respond to emails. Write something. When I get to the end of his nap, I want to be able to look back and point to what I accomplished. Our Western culture runs at a rapid pace. There are goals and check lists and books on how to be more efficient with your time, how to prioritize and avoid distraction, how to enter a state of flow, how to do more, be more. Sometimes it all feels like different aspects of how to live up to an impossible, ever-expanding expectation. You are never enough, it all seems to scream.
I am drawn to the contemplative path—in part—as a way to counteract this culture. Yet even here the goal-oriented, grasping for accomplishment culture sneaks its way in. I manage to turn even contemplative practices of presence into some sort of to-do list, some way of measuring up. Check. I completed my grounding practice for the day. Check. I’m closer to attaining a level of higher consciousness [insert facepalm here]. While discipline and consistency in any habit can be important, completion is not the end goal. At least it’s not mine. Transformation is my goal. But even that can slip into something I strive for. (Even my use of the word “goal” betrays me here.)
The tree is just being.
It’s not aware of how many pounds of fruit it produces or how many jars of crabapple butter I make from its yield. Fruit or no fruit, it still stands there, offering its leaves to the sun, breathing in carbon dioxide and transforming it into oxygen for my lungs. Offering me shade as I sit on my front porch and lift my eyes to the kaleidoscope of blue sky glimpsed between its branches. The tree is steady and present, rooted deep within the ground. The fruit will come one year and not the next. The tree is unphased.
This morning I long to be fallow like this tree, to let go of any sense of accomplishment and just be. I don’t want to read or write or even do yoga today. Can I allow that to be okay? The cicadas are singing, the vibrato of their murmuring resonating with the flow of energy that begins in my feet and travels up my legs into my spine if I slow long enough to pay attention. It is as if the life that holds the cicada and the life that holds me are one. It flows within us both and the lines between us blur. The steam from my cup of tea lifts off my mug as if whirling in a mysterious dervish before disappearing into the atmosphere. These are the things I notice when I stop trying to accomplish something, when I sit under the shade of my fallow tree and allow it to speak.
A benediction from the poet Mary Oliver:
When I Am Among the Trees
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
My previous post about Crabapples.
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Shalom.
