I see myself in everything, especially the trees
On the day in question, I wake up feeling incredibly calm. It has rained all night – I can
practically hear the water seeping into the garden, doing good when the birds interrupt my
dreams at dawn with their usual singing. Everything's growing! I think. Ah, life! I doze back to
sleep. But as the morning brightens I am disturbed by another noise which doesn’t fit the usual
pattern: a neighbour's handyman hacking away at the beloved lilac bush that leans over our
garden filling the air with its perfume every May. Every year I wait patiently for the buds to open.
When they turn purple it means winter has really gone and we've made it to spring. This is no
small thing. I sit outside and inhale their perfume in the dark for weeks. On this day, when I
venture out into the garden, the branches of that bush are strewn about the floor. Once he is
done with them, the man hacks the branches off the nearby elder tree too, blossom, burgeoning
berries and all.
I don’t understand people who cut down trees. It makes me so sad.
Luckily this world also contains all the poems Mary Oliver ever wrote, and there I can see that I
am not alone in loving the trees and all their leaves and branches and all the birds that perch on
them en route to wherever they're flying. Luckily, I can flick to the pages of one of her books
and find a little solace. Her poem, ‘Foolishness? No, it’s not’ tells of her counting all the leaves
on a tree, ‘half crazy with the wonder of it — the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the
branches, the hopelessness of my effort.’ I read it in the cool darkness that evening when I can’t
sleep. I remember the lilac bush as it was when it was thriving, full of life. I think about how
hopeless I feel now and try to remind myself that this will pass.
Of course, the poems are all printed on paper so I'm just another hypocrite in a world full of
people saying one thing and doing another. Nothing is ever so simple as good or bad, right or
wrong. The stump of the lilac and the elder remain, mangled, mutated, but rooted in the ground.
Hopefully they will sprout fresh branches. Plants bounce back, often much more quickly than
humans do.
Whatever their fate, at the very least, I've got a tiny lilac plant that self-seeded from the hacked
apart bush growing in a pot. It currently has two tender branches and seventeen leaves. One day,
years from now, when it’s grown tall and bushy and it’s blooming for the very first time, I'm
going to sit underneath its branches and whisper Mary Oliver’s poem to it in the dark.
Originally published by Ponder Savant 2020
Sara Collie is a writer and language tutor living in Cambridge, England. She has a PhD in French Literature and a lifelong fascination with the way that words and stories shape and define us. Her writing explores the wild, uncertain spaces of nature, the complexities of mental health, and the mysteries of the creative process. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Neon Door, The Selkie, Confluence, Synkroniciti,Stonecrop Review, Outwrite, Full Mood Magazine and elsewhere.