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The Hugging Tree An Adventure With Uncertainty by Kelsey Collins |
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What is The Hugging Tree?Since the time I was born in 1951, I have had a mother, a father, a stepfather, a sister, a half-sister, three husbands and countless affairs. My childhood included bicycle riding, tetherball, hopscotch, lies, betrayal, beatings and incest. My best friend died in 1969, a week after he arrived in Viet Nam where he stepped on a land mine while walking across a field with his new platoon. He was the only one killed. "It must have been a good day to die," he would have said. Death has been a consistent visitor at my door for nearly five decades. Accidents, cancer, old age, disease and suicide claimed many of the precious, treasured people around me. Their stories, their deaths, have altered my life and affected my perception of finality, of invincibility, of the infinity and remarkable resilience of the soul. I grew up near a 200-acre strawberry field. Sometimes a few neighborhood friends and I would sneak out into the neat rows of strawberries. We would cautiously slither on our bellies in the moist gullies between the plants so we wouldn't be seen by the Mexican itinerant laborers who worked in the fields. We would quietly pick bags of big, juicy strawberries, our "ammo." I don't remember ever being caught, but it was exciting and dangerous to think about what would happen if we were. Then we climbed up in the branches of the eucalyptus trees that lined the road and wait for our prey: unsuspecting motorists. Their windhshields made great targets. Splat! The bright red juices and tiny seeds would make a wonderful mess, looking like coagulated blood to a mischievous seven-year-old. It was while sitting way up high in those tree branches, feeling very much like a big robin, that I hugged my first tree…and felt it hug me back. The trees became my protective sanctuary - their branches were like loving arms around me. At first it was only about survival; I had to hold onto the trunk to keep my balance and find just the right spot for my tennis shoes to grip as I climbed higher and higher. I could feel my heart racing up into my throat, pounding faster and faster, harder and harder, until my face was flushed as red as the strawberries in my paper sack. Every time a soft breeze would blow through these tall trees - some nearly a hundred feet high - their green leaves rubbed against me like the soft caresses of your grandmother's arms and whisper a message: "Hold onto us," they would sigh, "and we will keep you safe and help you heal." Trees of all varieties, some short, some tall, some ancient, some as thin as reeds, have always willingly offered their strength to me. Many Native American tribes call them "tree people", literally "beings" that provide much more than shade. When my mother was dying from ovarian cancer, her pain became nearly unbearable in the final months, even with morphine injections every three hours. While on a slow walk one day, I offered to her the possibility of "giving a tree her pain." She looked at me as if I had completely lost my mind, but something inside her walked over to the biggest eucalyptus tree she could find. "What do I do?" she asked as she approached the broad, smooth, light green trunk of the tree. "Put your arms around the tree and allow your body to touch it as much as possible. Then, simply, ask the tree to take your pain up through its branches into the sky and down through its roots into the earth. The sky is so big and limitless; it can take all of your pain. The earth is so big and dense; it can absorb all of your pain. If you believe it, it will be so." She did exactly as I suggested, pressing her thin, frail body against the massive tree trunk, nearly five feet in diameter. After a few moments, she slowly backed away from the tree. A huge smile broke out across her face, looking rather like a Cheshire cat, the first real smile I had seen there for many weeks.
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