Seeking Solace and Sycamores

I enter the snow-covered Homewood Cemetery, my face already numb. In the open space past the iron entrance gate, the wind increases in sound and sensation, numbing my hands as well. I've just come from an hour of heated yoga; body and mind are finding the transition difficult. 

I seek an ideal sycamore, thinking that my first essay will meditate upon it and penetrate its surface. I slush down the path along the stone fence to a sycamore I once pondered. I place my gloved hands on its fortified bark, admiring its patiently cultivated power. Above, hundreds of crows squawk in their flight from tree to tree, their conversation as loud as those of humans crammed into crowded coffee shops.

Crows fly overhead

I begin to wonder: is such loudness the natural state of these birds? Or have their vocal cords (do crows have vocal cords?) adapted to compensate for the loudness we humans have cultivated?

I seek silence today, silence and space. The crows thwart my goal. I leave the sycamore in frustration.

Like Joyce Carol Oates in her essay “Against Nature,” I’m becoming frustrated with my habit toward idealizing “nature.” I want to see nature as a pure landscape that reminds us of our natural state of blissful unity with the Cosmos. I want to recognize crows as beautiful manifestations of God-given life and flight. But today, I see ugly annoying black creatures that won’t shut the hell up.

Cold and annoyed, I continue in search of a new tree, a tree to represent my presence amidst the dissatisfaction I feel. I’m stopped along the way at the slight of a squirrel perched on a tree’s protrusion. The squirrel sits calmly in the foreground, staring at me, while in the background hundreds of squawking crows fly from treetop to treetop. I stare back admiring his stillness. Then he leaps to another branch and departs.

My pal the squirrel

I descend a slope and find a row of sycamores. Their trunks are dense and covered in tumor-like protrusions. They don’t feel correct. Still, searching for something, I approach them. But my gaze is pulled to the side, and deeper into the cemetery, I see my tree, my sycamore.

It rises isolated in the distance, beside an oak, before a pine cradled within a willow’s bosom. As I settle before it, the crows shriek in unison and collectively depart to their next destination.

The sycamore appears almost as if glimmering. Beige dominates its reptilian camouflaged bark, standing in stark contrast to the green and brown trees surrounding it. I approach to consider it from close proximity. The bark’s dark Rorschachian patterns look and feel like rough felt. I gently press my ear to the tree, hoping to receive a message that does not come.

Past several rows of headstones, leafless brush surrounds an ice-covered pond. In front of the pond, four deer graze in the snow. One of them appears adolescent. I pause once more and stare at the deer for several minutes. The largest one stares back, its ears pointed high. I’m not sure why I keep staring—I see deer most times I enter this space. Something about its presence instills in me a desire to breathe. And as I breathe, I recognize the scene I am experiencing as space, great space.

Gretel Ehrlich concludes her essay “The Solace of Open Spaces” with the assertion that we like to fill spaces; openness disturbs us, as does silence. But amidst my cold dissatisfaction, this squirrel, this sycamore, and this deer remind me the importance of openness, lest the mind, like our coffee shops, become cluttered with noise.

Maybe, in our idealization of the cleansing properties of “nature,” we have confused two concepts: nature and space. Nature is everything, including that cluttered coffee shop. But space is openness. While Ehrlich is correct, I believe we also crave moments that remind us of this openness, precisely because we have made our lives so cluttered. But nature is the clutteredness as much as it is the space. There’s no “going back” to some pure place. There’s just breathing into the moment. I enjoy open spaces, this graveyard, for its space is sufficient for peaceful animals, and the animals’ peace reminds me to be still, even as the shrieking crows return, offering no sign of their departure. 

A fat squirrel that said goodbye