Today I went up to my favorite resting place; Mt. Lemmon. It is a huge relief to be able to escape from the desert floor and rise up into the pines like a fresh wind. I know the curvy road up the mountains so well that I drive it one-handed. I roll down my windows and inhale the scent of wet earth, resin from the trees, and enjoy birdsong from the anonymous orators in the trees.
This morning I was feeling drained and raw, my brain stretched in so many different directions the night before that it had snapped and now lay in a proverbial pool in the base of my skull.
So I went hiking. Walking through the forest immersed my mind in a salve, the greens and browns mixed by the slanted morning light, the birds’ varied notes falling on my heart like raindrops.
And I saw this wizened old man along the trail, bent over by old age and possibly scoliosis. He twisted and bent over, and at one point tendons unraveled, giving a view through them. He has seen better years. He had a tumor (two, actually) that clung to his neck.
I felt sorry for him, but he wasn’t completely twisted and broken. He had a bright green tuft of leaves at the end of this long, curved branch.
Next to this elder, only a few feet away was another figure. She was tall, long-limbed but curved with age. Gone were any external adornings of youth; only the spartan beauty of wisdom and a arms held out in a long-sustained desire.
They are old, and overlooked among their younger, healthier counterparts. They are two in a forest of two million, but today they both caught my attention. It is a strange gift to not have deadened the pangs of longing even in old age, like these trees– a kind of longing described by C.S. Lewis as a desire to find “where all the beauty came from.” There is a kind of beauty in the longing of these two broken figures, a beauty more apparent quite possibly because they are more broken than most. It takes a great deal of strength to deny death in ones exposed bones and bring beauty in a broken world; and yet, these trees do so naturally.
A dead tree becomes the foundation for a carpet of green moss; a bowed limb is the most amiable of rests for an avian opera.
Six Months Later 