I return to the trees

Photo credit: Booker T. Sessoms 2022

When I am lost, I return to the trees. The trees are forgiving, steadying, predictable. The trees don’t give up.

Neither will we, I tell myself as I walk through the autumnal streets of Boston, my eyes following the falling leaves. The brilliant yellows and reds. The deep blue sky and shining white clouds. The primary colors and jewel tones of the fall feel like a last explosion of joy before the long cold winter. Is this where we are now?

There are things I cannot unsee, not anymore. The jeering, the mocking, the profound lack of empathy. The obscene hoarding of wealth. The celebration of violence, or murder, of genocide. The divorce from our own humanity, as we reject that of others. I hold all of this in my body and weep for us.

I have always been an optimistic person. Some of this is privilege. I am not forced to amputate an arm, a city, a child. I can sit at a distance, muse over beauty and loss, and walk away. But that is precisely it. Walking away does not create optimism, it creates empty politeness, a void of humanity that will always just be cold. And it is this void we must breach to be optimistic, to know that our community of humans and earth is all we have, that it is plenty, that we are enough.

As I walk, the words of a favorite poem by Marge Piercy ring in my head: “I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.” Does it, though, I ask myself. Does the rootedness, the dogged, almost impossible, stick-it-outed-ness really depress me in people? Right now, I believe this is exactly what we need: stubborn optimism. Optimism that says: love wins. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, this season, or next year. But every day, in the small. And every century as we wait out the hatred that can never heal or soothe or hold.

The trees know. I return to the trees.