The forest is a place where death is transformed. When a tree crashes through the forest back to the ground there appears to be a loss. But what is gained? Walking through the uncleared land behind my home, I find a favorite old tree. It came down around the time when we first moved into this house, 14 years ago. When my teenagers were smaller children this tree was a favorite place to climb and navigate as a kind of thick, wooden balance beam. From its first moments after its fall, parts of it had already become a cozy home for bugs of all sort. Still now, mosses and lichens grow over it. There is sunshine that is able to pour through that space around the denser “forest” of trees and so ferns and wildflowers grow around the dead tree body.
Christie Purifoy writes in her book Placemaker, “When a forest tree falls…the combination of fresh sunlight and broken wood is combustible, but it burns with a life-giving flame. Within hours of a tree’s collapse, the sugary reek of ruined wood has gathered to itself beetles and other insects that chew and bore. Singing birds and silent bacteria will come. Fungi will flower…furry animals will come drawn by sunshine and a dry lookout to deposit seeds in and around…Scientist Dave George Haskell tells us that ‘at least half of the other species in the forest find food or home in or on the recumbent bodies of fallen trees.”
The experience of death comes as one of the greatest kinds of disruption we know in life. When a person “crashes” back to the ground, it can be far harder to see the way that life also comes to surround that chasm. Yet, in my own experience, I have felt much like the metaphor of the tree. I have experienced the way that death leaves me like that tree that has crashed to the ground, and the exquisite experience of other humans coming alongside me, much like the insects, birds, and furry animals come alongside the “sugary reek of ruined wood.”
Why have I retreated into this musing? Perhaps it’s the call of Autumn decay or the way that this time of year holds numerous opportunities for reflection with anniversaries of both death and last moments with life. The way, too, my place in midlife wants to reveal and show me something about death and life that I want to not miss.
And also perhaps it’s because life has felt like a big interruption lately, with other people’s needs crashing into my own plans moment after moment. I have faced the death of plans and expectations over and again. Isn’t that the way life is? Truly, this season of life feels like one series of interruptions with something or someone crashing into my day as an interruption I want to refuse. I don’t like to be interrupted and the seemingly smaller, daily ones I find myself far more frustrated by than when the catastrophic knocks me off my feet and leaves me unable to do anything but be interrupted.
Yet, I long to live in communion with life as it is. So, I sit, examining the daily interruptions, wondering if they could be an invitation to experience life another way, to experience relationship with life another way. Am I perhaps being asked to see what other life forces might grow around and within me during these times too?