A Tree Ring Meditation
There’s a gap now where the tall ash stood. In a year or so the scene will close around it. As I count the rings, it was just about my age, maybe a few years on. A sorry sight at the end: bug-infested, leafless, peeling and “blonding,” giving up the ghost. The tree surgeon took it down in segments, turning my yard into a temporary morgue. But his work has uncovered a new beauty, an arboreal mandala.
Here time is a ring composition, a shape for memory.
A core formed from warm days, crisp winters, as the tree learned to live by seasons. You recall them only as sun patches, snow piles, the daily rounds of childhood. Further out, the loops start to wobble where the young tree twisted in the gales. The roots held the weight and secured the return.
These rings make a figure of growth and resilience.
At intervals, it seems like someone dropped the compass. That terrible multi-year drought when everything almost shut down. Cowed by the bigger trees, you tried not to take up space. But the breath is a reflex like xylem and phloem. A decade later, you are sprinting for the crown. Until again the path narrows, where a surge of defenses took energy from growth. The tree survived, augmenting the trunk, as if to make up for all that contraction. Is there a law to it all? What made you bend? What put you right again? These rings are a rhythm of feelings, not of causes. (The causes are forgotten.)
You are not the person you were.
See how the lines tighten on their way to circumference: light and dark seasons a steady rotation, incremental growth. Yet variations persist, as pattern inside pattern. After cramped symmetries—more wayward errands, elliptical swerves; the rings find, again, the center, and expand. After all, the earth itself moves elliptically around the sun. Eccentricities leave a lovely wavering image in the wood.
Like that spring years ago in a forest far from here. You were out foraging for mushrooms with a man who wasn’t right for you—older, wilder. You were more than a little lost, but what a great detour. And then you saw the morels poking through the leaf litter. Their taste was rare. Eventually you made your way back to the main trail.
Each ring encloses the one that came before.
You are not the person you were, and that is a good thing too, for a stunted trunk cannot support a canopy. You could never live in a place without changes.
One year, a girl who was free discovered she was lonely; the next, she knew her body could be seen; desire was a forest to dance in. Each year was a revolution. Then, unexpectedly, she was sharing the light, turning in tandem. They sang as one, the woods made answer, echoes rang and rang. Until the circle felt like a square, with doors and a yard.
You are not the person you were, nor is he.
Which way is the right way around the tree? You seemed, at times, to be heading in different directions, one to the right, one to the left. Yet here you are, looping back, still wearing the rings those different people vowed to keep so long ago. Heartwood will not revive, says the stump, but it has always supported the tree, in its vertical growth, and in its widening span. These are not pond rings; they did not dissolve. You are glad of the structure.
These rings shape a philosophy: life is centrifugal, but also concentric.
There was very little time for looking back until now. You were dizzily adding on the layers—a job, a husband, a house, a book, a child, another book, another job, another book, another child, another house--now you hear the song in it. You can spiral back toward the silent center, like a needle on vinyl. The needle skips where the lines are tight; you were so tasked you had no time to feel. These notes can’t be replayed. Or the needle gets stuck, repeats on the dark patches, those burn marks and scars, nicks, scratches, cracks, dents, and knots, though when they were made you ignored them, as surface imperfections on the paneling. Now it is clear that some of them went deeper, crossing many rings. But this is not soft pine, full of pitch pockets and seams. This is hard ash, stoical, resilient.
You are not the person you were. Tougher now, with more defenses.
Still, there are shocks in any life, and they leave their marks. A lot of it was weather—lightning strikes, blowdowns, ice storms, the frost cracks that formed from a too sudden warming after a bitter winter. There were assaults of an earthlier kind, as well. You mistook them for embrace—a buck rubbing its horns, claw marks from a bear, holes left by a parasite. For a few years some gall hung on the outer branches. Nevertheless, the air here was good; the lichens grew without harming the bark. Some moist years there were mushrooms everywhere, small animals churning compost as they buried their nuts.
And the rings revived whenever the sun broke through.
Now, the song rehearsed, you can wonder how you got here, think of origins and stock, the chances that made you. But that pith at the center is nothing but a point in time. Under it lie untold stories, others’ decomposing rings and roots, a past only remotely concerning you.
Your forbears are not the person you are, though you honor their struggle, who clung to life on thin, unbroken soil.
There is another way to tell your story--as a series of events. You can bore into the trunk with that long probe, taking the core sample, pulling out a timeline. But life isn’t just beginnings, middles, and ends.
It is also returns. The rings map an odyssey.
What are these long stains halfway through the rounds, that run across like spokes on a wheel? New wood, where the tree sent out branches. The trunk envelops them in its widening girth, until at one point they disappear, where they broke out into the air, dropped their seed into loose earth and started another story.
Let those rings circle in their separate stems.
They are not the person you are, though like a mother tree, you sent your care underground. They are not even the people they were, though you smile when the sun shines on them, and remember the saplings. These same webs will consume you soon.
Now bring your attention back to the edge, the epidermis, where the tree meets the air.
It is pulling away as the binding cells whither and the inner bark, the place of sensing, loosens its hold. See the wormy lines on the cambium layer. And the ragged outer bark tells a story like the one in your mirror—deep grooves, from weeping and laughing. A life lived in a forest of lives.
These rings cannot lie. You will not be the person you are, as you cycle back into the soil.
Think of it all with kindness as you lift your gaze and return now to the forest around you.
Bonnie Costello divides her time between Boston and western Massachusetts, and practices both literary criticism and creative writing. Read more.