March 7, 2006
The writing feels good. I wonder if the feelings I put into the writing might come back out for a person who reads my words. That would be good.
So instead of quietly pitching them away or losing them when I buy a new computer I will put them here. Maybe someone will read and understand.
The first thing I will post is "White Pines". I wrote it on a winter day a couple months ago.
These thoughts are an elusive thing. They move through my mind, brushing my consciousness like a breeze across my face. They pass and there is no way to prove they existed at all.
I am thinking about trees, white pines. There is a softness about them when the sun is low in the late summer afternoon sky.
There is a cabin in northern Minnesota . In the past it was my grandfather's home. The cabin sits on the shore of a lake in the shade of white pines that he planted 65 years ago.
I am quite sure he was planting white pines not just trees. His face would animate when he spoke of big white pines. He was drawn to them.
I too am forced to stop and stare when I see a big white pine. Maybe there is a white pine gene.
I have a picture in my mind composed of memories and imagination. In the scene it is the end of a hot summer day and the sun is low. I float in a row boat far out on the still lake looking towards the shore and the pines. There is a clear softness about everything. A richness to be consumed.
I am a teenage boy in a rowboat with cut off blue jeans and no shirt, very tan, almost burnt, just floating and watching. Stillness emanates from the pines. The needles look so soft. I have the urge to touch them in their softness, but they are far away. There is a luster in the light. I think it comes from the pines.
***
In the city, the wind most likely has a scraping sound like paper or leaves on pavement or the sound of things that come loose and flap. Empty sounds of erosion. Man made things wearing down. It is different where the pines grow.
Language falls short of the task of description. I say words, but don't know their meaning until I have the experience.
There is a resort somewhere up north that I have driven by.
To the casual passerby the name, “Whispering Pines” might speak of a tourist trap, T shirts and souvenir mugs. Just a dumb woodsy sounding name.
The person who named his resort the "Whispering Pines" heard and felt something and did his best to describe it.
The breeze in the pines has been engineered out of our lives. We can't be expected to understand. Ours is a world of climate control systems and safety glass.
***
It is quiet in the woods by the big pine. The world is still, an empty church. Time has stopped, existence frozen in a masterpiece painting. Dappled sunlight comes to rest on deep greens and lush browns; incredible detail down to the small yellow capsules on slender stems rising from the moss. Nearby, fiddle heads of ferns are stopped in the act of opening.
Existence is frozen here like a bug entombed in amber.
Those outside the influence of the spell cast by the pine rush by oblivious to everything but their lists and responsibilities. Here, by the tree, they are aliens.
Our world is moving. We can't risk a look to the side. Credit is extended and bills are paid. Children are dropped off at school and parents are five minutes early for work. Or maybe five minutes late. The world we know is held together with contracts and obligation. Who can blame us for our frenzy.
The big tree has a gravity of its own. I am drawn nearer to it and look up. It seems even larger than before. My alien self surfaces momentarily and an obscene thought involving board feet flits through my mind.
Above in the high reaches a breeze, like a breath exhaled by some giant, moves through the boughs. The needles in pairs, scrape together, each making a tiny noise, in its self too small to be heard, but together tens of thousands of little scrapings of needles make a gentle sound. The pines do whisper, but my alien ears can not make out the detail of what is said.
Somehow my heart knows and emotion rises in me. For a moment I am connected and part of everything.
What secret do the pines whisper? My heart holds still and breathing stops so that maybe my concious mind can make out the whispered words.
A kind of understanding comes. A feeling I have known before.
At the cabin a long time ago, as children, we would walk at night in the dark under the pines and out to the lake. One night I walked surrounded by the peeping and trilling of tree frogs and toads with my head swimming in the darkness.
There was the inevitable kick and stumble in the dark. My eyes instinctively cast to the ground groping for the form of a rotten log tripped on in the night. Instead, floating in the dark at my feet was a galaxy of little lights seemingly as vast and distant as the Milky Way.
As I looked down it seemed the stars had left the sky and clustered about my feet. My mind could not come to terms with what my eyes where seeing. Darkness above me stars below, utter blackness all around.
I went to my knees to get my eyes closer to the inexplicable lights floating about my feet. Trying to understand what I was seeing I slowly reached my hand towards the stars on the ground. Like some god in an ancient myth I closed my hand around a group of them and gazed into infinity at less than an arms length.
The light of the next day revealed the universe at my feet had been an ordinary rotten log kicked apart, strewn across the ground. Some trick of nature held the light of the stars within the log until my foot broke apart the soft wood and released the phosphoresence.
The next night I eagerly went to the spot flashlight in hand hoping to see it again, but the universe in the log had gone dark, the light was spent. Something important had happened and I was the only one who knew.
I struggle with inadequate words. Write of silence or deafening noise, completeness, the vastness of the universe, delicate life, chaos, perfect order. The best I can come up with is like the “whispering pines” painted by the resort owner on his sign. I will never describe or capture it, but I try because tomorrow it will be gone.
J. T.
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