Love is the Experience of Infinity

This morning the message that came with my cup of tea was love is the experience of infinity.

I like that.

I was cutting back olive trees all week and it was one of the best weeks I’ve had in a long time. There is something so deeply satisfying about getting rid of what isn’t needed or is in the way of healthy growth. Olive trees grow branches in surprising ways! Branches grow straight up into the air out of other branches. There are also tiny branches that are more like tree hairs that crowd and are so fun to snip snip snip away.

The leaves of an olive tree are long and green and graceful and hurt like crazy when they poke you in the eye. Every time it happened I would think, That won’t happen again, and continue to shove my face deep into the tree to reach for another tangled branch, squinting and also thinking that maybe I should get some goggles that afternoon just in case.

The work would start early in the morning. I’d wake up, pull on some boots and go out to feed the chickens. On the way to the coop, I’d pass the three olive trees outside the house where I live, the three olive trees in the middle of the driveway, and the handful of trees that are by the main house, and I’d see the dark congested spots, the heaviness, and I’d think, That tree needs help. Niko said I should be able to see light between the branches so the tree can thrive.

I’d go into the chicken coop, count that all six chickens were there, scrub out the water fountain with my bare hand (oh! the water is so cold!), fill the small metal trough with food that looks like big grains of sand, scatter a coffee can full of dried corn and seeds, and head for the tool shed to get my gloves and clippers.

I used to be afraid of ladders.

There is something wonderful about setting up a ladder close enough to a tree so that you can both climb and lean on something that holds you. Maybe this is how tree hugging started because I sure was grateful to the trunks that held me as I went higher into the boughs. I hesitate to write this, but yes, I did talk to the tree. “Hey!” “Thank you!” “How are you?”

I learned this thing once where you can run energy through a tree. First you ask its permission, and then, if you feel the answer is yes, you take a deep breath and imagine that the tree is part of your breathing loop. You can go in either direction, but let’s say you start top to roots: on the exhale, you imagine your breath going down through the branches, through the trunk, through the roots, and then you inhale and the breath comes up from the tree roots through the bottoms of your feet, up your legs, your torso, and out your head back to the top of the tree, and then you exhale and the loop continues.

If you want to reverse direction and play games with how you run your breath through the tree, it’s your life and you can have a field day.

Do you see how the tree becomes a sort of filter? That’s why you have to ask permission. You can’t just run your crazy breath through something vital without asking first!

Anyway.

Trees are wonderful.

And when you cut back what is not needed on a tree or a plant, it’s so easy to take that to the next step and start doing that in your life. So much noise, so much thinking. How much of it supports our growth?

I could happily spend long days up in the tree searching out all that isn’t needed.

It’s like editing.

My mother taught me how to write clean sentences. She wrote beautifully, and I imitated her, both in the way the words looked when she wrote them with a pen or pencil on paper and how they sounded when she read them to me or when I read them silently in my head.

The gardener was not happy when he saw when I had done to the trees. He’s a gentle man and he’s patient with me, but he was like what the fuck? He said there would be fewer olives that year because I had cut the lower branches, and the guys who picked the fruit in the fall would not go to the top of the trees to get what is there. He showed me how to cut the branches even more closely to the trunk so there is no nub left from which growth would later spring and cause tree chaos.

Luckily, there are a lot of olive trees on the property and I’d only bonsai’d a handful (okay, seven. Maybe nine. If you are reading this, Carolyn, I am sorry about the olives, but I think the trees look wonderful—airy and light.)

If you think of yourself as a tree, so much of you is the trunk, solid and full of life. When you breathe into that place, you go from earth to the heavens. You are a conduit of energy, a link to infinity, love.

What attaches to you that takes your energy? What interferes with the easy play of inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale?

Let it go. Let it fall away.

My very favorite essay is Living Like Weasels by Annie Dillard. I may have printed it up and then eaten the page so that the words would be part of my body.

This is the final paragraph:

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

Here’s the thing: on my deathbed, I want to have known that I spent it all as a writer, that I got all the best out of me that I could. The week I spent on the trees, I wrote nothing.

What is busywork and what is meaningwork? Doing work where you can see the result can be so satisfying: the dishes are washed, the errand accomplished, the grass cut, but work of a more ephemeral nature: creating, dreaming, imagining, can feel less valuable or important when in fact it is the thing that is most us, the most alive.

I loved cutting the trees, but, in the end, they didn’t need me.

What else am I doing to avoid the work of creating, of the self?

And why?

The week was wonderful because I had such a strong sense of purpose. How can I, we, create this sense of purpose when it comes to creating something no one is asking us to create, something we can’t even perhaps fully envision yet, something perhaps we only partly believe in?

How can we value dreaming as much as doing?

Any why?

Spirit Hill Farm is a magical place. And the best news is that you can stay here: http://spirithillfarm.net