There is something lovely about arriving ‘home’ just as the rain sets in. For ‘home’ read wherever you’re bedding down for the night, but it’s better if it is somewhere you’re bedding down for more than one night. It might be home-home, or just a-few-days-home depending on quickly you’ve learned to live your way into a place. I’m told that I’ve mastered that art. I can ensconce myself in a few hours, spread stuff out, find the best light for reading and writing, figure out the scope or limitations of a kitchen, stock the fridge with…well, you get the picture.
Ensconce. That’s a lovely word. A sconce is an ornamental or elaborate candle holder fixed to a wall. So, to ensconce is a transitive verb: to put a light into its holder, fix it firmly. The reflexive verb to ensconce oneself, therefore, has this sense of becoming firmly embedded, securely held, but also – since candles burn down and must be removed – there is a sense of the transitory nature of such holding.
That’s how I live my way into my temporary abodes. I embed myself firmly, but with a view to gathering up my things easily enough at the end of the stay.
As I write this, I know that the bedroom I’m using has an open suitcase in the corner that I’m tossing laundry into (who cares how you pack to go home, so long as it all fits in the bag?). The bed is unmade, and clean (and clean-enough) clothes are draped haphazardly on appropriate and inappropriate surfaces. The pair of almost-proper shoes that I brought for ‘evening’ wear sit upside down on the carpet, even though they’re clean, having only stepped from door to car to restaurant and back again. The real proper shoes, the ones I’ve traipsed along river banks and up onto the moor in, sit muddy inside the front door.
I look around the living room, The sofa is cluttered with my lap-top case, the make-up bag that I use for transporting camera-, computer- & phone-cables, a receipt, my Schieff rope, a book that I finished reading & haven’t yet reviewed. My camera cable is on the floor – I’ve been uploading this morning’s photos. The camera itself is on a corner shelf, on top of the maps and walking guides. I’ve pulled a winged armchair over to the French doors that open onto a balcony that I do have the use of overlooking a garden that I probably don’t. I took my rope flow across the road into the park instead.
On this wet afternoon, I have as much access as I need to the garden. I can look down upon it. I can see the seasonal berries and the unseasonal flowers. The squirrel that was finding things to eat on the lawn this morning has long since retreated out of the weather. A green swing frame looks despondent without its summer cushions. The stone bench with its bronze cat is more in keeping. Beech leaves from some unseen tree speckle the lawn and the artificial grass of the balcony. Shining porcelain poppies catch the rain.
Beyond the wall, a majestic thirty-foot silver birch waves her fronds and scatters golden leaves, the green ones holding yet, but more thinly now, the black of her higher branches and slender twigs hinting at her winter form. She’s sturdy in her centre, merely tossing her hair and flicking her fingers at the weather.
Someone told me that attention was to look at a tree, and intention was to put yourself inside it, to become the tree. Maybe. For me, when we truly sit with a tree, and yes we can truly sit with it, over the wall, behind the window, just by sitting and really looking…quietly…not thinking, not needing to touch, just looking…when we do that, we have no need to put our attention on the tree, or our intention into it…because we already know: we are the tree, and tree is us. I feel the joy of shaking my branches in the autumn rain, letting go of my leaves, but at the same time I am me sitting in the warmth of a borrowed room, looking out through the small Georgian panes of the windows. The wood & glass, the garden, the wall, these things do not separate us, unless we choose to build them in our consciousness. Their material presence is immaterial, if we choose it so. And on this wet afternoon, we do, the birch tree and I.
I settle down to write and, just as in my pauses I look out at the tree, it spends an idle afternoon peering in through the window at this strange human creature that seems to recognise it more than most, that seems to be paying more attention / intention / interaction / connection / awareness than most…but one afternoon in the life of birch, is fleeting. It won’t remember me any more than I remember any of the individual leaves I kicked my way through this morning.
The rain stops. And the wind rises. Birch steps out of Flow and into Chaos. Her central trunk moves in rhythm to the angry air. The departing sun took with it the golden glow and all gentleness is gone. Leaves that were gently falling or had landed now swarm in the air, giant uncertain bees looking for out of season honey, or a more fertile place to land. The wind itself has something to say about all of this. Nothing as dramatic as a howl, rather a low mournful moan.
Does Birch reproach me for her sister that hunkered against my gable wall or does she understand through the underground network that sometimes the tree is too close to home and cannot be allowed to stay. Is she angry or am I too insignificant for her concern?
If Istep back again into the oneness, away from the notion of tree & I as separate beings, away from the notion of this standing Birch being separate from the one I felled and then uprooted I feel no anger. What’s done is done; what matters is what is. I feel exhilaration. The autumn cleansing, the dance of shedding, the last lightening, the glory of the year-ending. I feel the damp loam beneath my rooted feet. I feel my grip tightening on earth as my sap sinks slowly, preparing for the winter storms. I give thanks for my leaves and bid them on their way, they will become me again some of them as they rot down and I absorb them back, transmute them, bring them back to new life.
I wonder about my leaves. Do they remember their former lives with me? As they soar through the wild autumn evening, as I send them on their way, do they feel abandoned, or simply wild, and free?
We are alike the Birch and I in that we live our lives and we know what we know, and the scope and scale of what we do not. We are not concerned. We know who we each are and how we meet, and merge, and flow out again.
I greet Birch in the sunlight of the following day and she still dances.
When I return, I will remember Birch and say hello and good to see you. When I return Birch will not remember me.
