talking trees

I wish I knew what the trees were saying. Either they’re mumbling in their dreams or I’m sleepwalking.

Last night we went for a walk in the dark, wrapped in a blanket, just to stand on a little wooden bridge and hear the stream pass beneath. I’ve always loved the sound of running water, and it is one of my dreams to live next to a river or stream. The first time I heard Handel’s Water Music as a child, my imagination was captured and I have since associated music with water. Every waterway has its own song, some bright with sparkling hope and others darkly mournful. I felt the song of the stream last night, but not through my ears. I really do think it was singing, words I wish I knew, words I think I believe I will one day understand, if all of creation is to be renewed.

We sat on a bench under a tree, a whispering tree, probably with spiders threatening to spin webs in my hair at any moment. For once I wasn’t nervous about the bugs, just happy to know there are still places where trees are comforting in the dark. Of course, having my husband beside me also lessened the fear of scurrying creatures. But they are creatures, too, we all are, the stream and spider and I alike, and on quiet nights you can hear our sighing. There is something yet to come, this I know at least, something that involves our little lives now in a grand story.

There are nights I feel rather like a woman from another time, thrust into the passing lane of the 401, from a time when the world was understood differently, when there was more magic and fear and awe. Those sorts of things help me understand deeper, they send out their tendrils and grasp the mysterious gospel, pulling it into dark heart soil where it groans and grows, till I can almost make out the whispers in the leaves above me.

~lg