I heard my neighbor’s Japanese pear tree calling to me.
It called while I worked, gazing out my office window at its new spring
finery: white flowers and those soft, soft green leaves.
It sang to me as I rocked in the deck chair outside that used to sit on my
mama’s porch just a few years ago.
That pear tree danced in my dream, and whispered in my ear as I drove up
the driveway, and spoke itself alive into my sentences with
colleagues, sisters, and friends.
It was not just me being drawn to the tree. It was truly that Pear Tree was calling to me.
My sister had written the other day to say how a wave of unconditional love welled up as she passed some sunlit spruce trees lining the highway she was exiting. I felt that unconditional love too, for this familiar pear tree in my yard.
Something is happening to me in all of this people-isolation and social disengagement. A phenomenon. An awakening. A budding or deepening - I’m not sure which - reciprocity with my kin who are of nonhuman origins.
I heard that pear tree call to me louder than the robins’ ecstatic spring nest-
building songs.
It was more audible than the eight swallows’ in-flight gurgles and arcing ballet.
The pear tree’s invitation was engraved in the air, a formality of the most
generous sort.
I thought that walking around the edge of her low-hanging boughs, taking a few photos to honor, note, and praise her springtime regeneration, would be the response she sought.
But that was two or three days ago and since then I’ve continued to hear her call to me, beckoning me to nestle in.
So this morning I approached, not knowing exactly what to do – awkward in my sudden intimacy with this pear tree after four years of watching her cycle through seasons.
I stood just outside the overhead circle of her canopy. She whispered, Come here. I took a few more barefooted steps through the cool morning grass. And I heard again, Please come nearer. And then before I realized what was happening, I was standing up against her thick, moss-swaddled trunk: belly to bark. My hands found the rugged grooves that a visiting black bear had etched. With two hands pressed up against her wood, fingers sliding deeper into the bear-claw message, I just waited there. I hoped for some instruction. Or I hoped for nothing at all.
As I moved into a meditation – that is, standing there quietly, still, and open – I saw a junco sitting on one of the tree’s limbs about ten feet away. Suddenly I was alive, engaged, in dynamic exchange with bear print, pear tree being, junco foraging. Each time the bird flitted to another branch, he would do a vibrating trill. I watched as the soft sound came out his open beak while his whole little body quivered with the effort.
I felt extraordinarily fortunate to be standing where I was, connected to whom I was, in those several minutes of pure absorption, pure interconnection, absolute interbeing.
Then it came to me:
I am touching Tree while Tree is being touched by Bird, and like a prayer circle with the laying on of hands, I am now extending a prayer I didn’t even know I was uttering.
I am extending a prayer to the Japanese pear tree.
I am extending a prayer to the lovely junco.
And a while later, a friend reminded me that I was extending a prayer, too, to the
black bear in whose prints my hands rested.
This wasn’t just my unconditional love for the tree; I felt loved by Tree as well. Unconditionally loved.
* * *
Next time, I won’t be waiting so long to meet the request of my other-than-human family.
Next time, I will begin with prayer.
“Next time” won’t be a while from now. It will be now and now and now … as the present unfolds itself.
