Jim not that way Jim. That's no way to treat a garage door, bending stiffly down at the waist and yanking at the handle so the door jerks up and out jerky and hard and you crack your shins and my ruined knees, son. Let's see you bend at the healthy knees. Let's see you hook a soft hand lightly over the handle feeling its subtle grain and pull just as exactly gently as will make it come to you. Experiment, Jim. See just how much force you need to start the door easy, let it roll up out open on its hidden greasy rollers and pulleys in the ceiling's set of spiderwebbed beams. Think of all garage doors as the well-oiled open-out door of a broiler with hot meat in, heat roiling out, hot. Needless and dangerous ever to yank, pull, shove, thrust. Your mother is a shover and a thruster, son. She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. She's never learned that treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way is also treating them and your own body in the most efficient way. It's Marlon Brando's fault, Jim. Your mother back in California before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie. Her big moment. Had to stand there in saddle shoes and bobby sox and ponytail and put her hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes roared by. A major thespian moment, believe you me. She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who? Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations' relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No? Well it was because of Brando you were opening that garage door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed
Trees are holy. If you know how to talk to them, how to listen to them, you will learn the truth. They preach not doctrines and rules: they preach, with no concern for details, the primal law of life.
A tree says: Hidden in me is a seed, a spark, a thought. I am life from eternal Life. The attempt the eternal Mother made with me, the risk She took, is unique—my shape is unique, the grain of my skin, the tiniest play of leaves on my crown and the tiniest scar on my bark. My task is to give shape to the eternal, and to show that shape in its unique, distinctive particularity.
A tree says: My power is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children I produce every year. I live out the mystery of my seed to the very end—that is my only concern. I trust that God is within me. I trust that my task is a holy one. I live from this trust.
When we're sad and have difficulty enduring our life any longer, a tree can say to us: Be quiet! Be at peace! Look at me! Life is not easy, nor is it hard. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you while you stay silent. You are scared because your path is leading you away from your mother and your home. But home is not here or there. Home is inside you, or else it is nowhere.
A fierce desire to wander and roam tugs at my heart when I hear the trees rustling in the evening wind. If you listen long and closely, this longing to travel, too, reveals its seed, its meaning. It is not, as it seems, a longing to run away from your sorrows. It is a longing for home, for the memory of your mother, for new images and parables for life. It leads you back home. Every path leads home, every step is a birth, every step is a death, every grave is the mother.
That is how the tree rustles in the evening, when our
