Sixteen years ago, my beloved Cottonwood tree, I planted you in the finest location of my new property, the first home I owned in Taos. I was excited about this earth canvas where I could create my own sacred garden. However, a problem soon arose. I didn’t know you were a Cottonwood when I planted you. Our story began when I purchased what I believed to be an Aspen at our local garden shop. I did so with the practical reasoning that although Cottonwood’s are my favorite tree, I had a small property, and an Aspen as your smaller cousin would be a more appropriate size, especially because I hoped to eventually plant two. Little did I imagine then that there is real danger in ignoring one’s heart. It is disrespect to the soul.
My then future husband, Standing Deer stopped by just as I
was leaving for the garden shop to pick up the new tree I had just purchased. He suggested
that his pickup truck would make transporting even a small tree much easier,
than my little Mercury Tracer. When we
arrived at the nursery, he looked at the tree I had chosen and said, “I see a
more robust one in the next row, and it’s the same price”. I had no objection,
shrugged my shoulders, and we loaded up the larger one. The next morning, with determination
and excitement I dug a deep hole in the hard earth of an unusually dry spring, grateful
that I still could do this in my sixties, and then added plant food and water.
I was proud of my new Aspen, and planned to buy another one the next year, as
Aspens in the wild often grow in groups.
Still excited by the creation of my own garden, the next
spring I planted an Aspen companion a few feet away. However, by the third
spring, I realized something was not right. Although as saplings, you cousins almost
looked the same, it was becoming apparent that you, as older brother was not behaving
like an Aspen. My soulmate Standing Deer who had plenty of Hayoka Medicine in his soul, had
played his role of trickster clown although unintentionally.
Dear Cottonwood, several years went by and you and your
Aspen cousin grew side by side. Then one summer you began to soar above the
Aspen. One morning, I was shocked to see that its leaves were drying up. I
tried to save it, but finally this case of mistaken identity proved fatal for your
much smaller Aspen cousin.
Standing Deer and I had lovingly watched the progress of you both from our patio each morning. It became a ritual accompanying our morning coffee. The Taos summer sky is brilliant azure, and often overseen by towering cumulus clouds. In this sweet memory, Father Sky and Mother Earth shared their love with us. Taos life in summer engages all the senses. The air is pleasantly filled with the sounds of chirping prairie dogs and singing birds, a few crickets and in the distance, someone’s chickens cluck contentedly as they search for insects and worms. With its brilliant contrast of light and shade, Taos is a glorious unpolluted world that still lives beneath a 21st century world. The purity of air is like a magnifying glass and makes the mountains to our east seem close enough to touch. However, recent danger lurks on the main road through town, big new fuel station/convenience stores, so out of proportion and out style for Taos are popping up like invasive weeds. Is this the result of COVID’s damage to our world? So many iconic local businesses were casualties.
Standing Deer loved to talk to the birds, each kind in its own language, and they answered enthusiastically as they hopped between you dear Cottonwood and your Aspen cousin. As a child of the Pueblo, he’d learned many bird languages, and you offered ample space for birds among your branches. At other times there was nothing more calming than the sound of your leaves flickering in a soft breeze. While the Aspens are called Quaking Aspen, both of your species have a soothing lambent music in even the softest breeze. It is a sound of love and peace. I might never have survived my childhood, If I had been an urban child only, but I knew Pacha Mama intimately and she sang soulfully through the voices of the trees, in harmony with the birds and insects.
During my childhood and adolescence, there lived a big
Cottonwood tree that spread its generous branches over the wild west end of
our family’s half acre. That tree was a dear friend. It was both a protector and
companion, always reliable and steady. Me, my cousins and the neighborhood
children ran free. Our world was invisible to adults. Yet, this was an earlier time
when the hard and even tragic aspects of life were not hidden from children.
When we went off into the wild on our horses, free from the need for social armor
we touched the earth with caution next to trust. We were not naïve, or arrogant. We
sometimes took chances but not stupid chances. In our rural, close to dirt and weeds world, life and death lived next to each other and thus life was more intense. Things in life collide and break into chaos when we lose step with our
beloved elemental guides.
Dear Cottonwood, your Aspen cousin died that summer. Standing Deer and I cut it down and wept when
it lay flat at your base. You are not to blame, we are. You tried to survive
our ignorance. Beloved Cottonwood. That was a sad time, but very soon the place
it had stood disappeared without a trace as if it was never there, and you
Cottonwood Soul Friend sored and acquired the thick gnarly trunk, that makes
Cottonwoods seem like wise and steadfast grandfathers.
Then, the year before Standing Deer’s illness worsened, you dear Cottonwood friend began to drop some of your smaller branches. I was alarmed lest I also lose you . Then a year after Standing Deer moved out of this 3-D world, it became apparent that you were also mortally ill. I researched tree diseases and discovered that planting trees too close together makes them vulnerable to a fatal fungal infection. You were now succumbing to the same disease that killed your Aspen cousin, all because in my ignorance I planted you to close together. I was beyond sad. A vengeful spirit seemed to be taking everything I loved, and everything that gave me meaning and healing solace. Your decline preceded two of the most difficult years of my life. It seems that everything that could go wrong did so and yet, I know that it was a lesson plan carefully designed by my higher mind to shock me out of nostalgic but unlikely hopes. This background retreat no longer functions.
Some of your branches are still alive. I hold onto hope that
somehow you will recover, and yet I know that our story together contains the
essence of Nature’s Alchemy. You may die in physical presence, but your drama has
already set the magic of transformation in motion. When Standing Deer knew he
was dying, he told me that I had something more to do after he was gone. He has been gone three years and two and a
half months. He still works with me but in an entirely different way. He is the
soul friend that left me with the task of following the thread of my own soul
through another labyrinth. I've come to see past lives, present lives, and future
lives as one story different chapters. Our soul is like a house. We paint the walls with
different colors and sometimes add or subtract a room, perhaps update the plumbing and yet the basic structure stays.
Dear Cottonwood, I sometimes forget that you have roots hidden deep beneath the skin of Pacha Mama that extend as far below, as your above ground height. With that image comes the memory of the great Cottonwood of my childhood. It lived near the back of our family property, and it was my solace. I climbed it, swung from it, and when I needed its steadying comfort, I would lay on my back staring up through your branches from the roof of an old cinder block chicken shed. I would climb on top at night to watch moonbeams sparkling like soft stars on its fluttering leaves. This backyard of our family home was the physical equivalent of the unconscious mind. I was the only family member who ventured there for comfort. For everyone else, it was just a place to store away tools and objects that might be needed some day. But the Cottonwood was not alone. It had companions. There were Chokecherry bushes, Wild Plum trees, sour cherry trees, apple trees and raspberry bushes. The outer edge of our vegetable garden touched an apple tree that marked the invisible boundary where the wild part of the property began or ended depending on which way you looked.
Many of the dreams I still remember and continue to learn
from had this wild part of the family land as their backdrop. The Cottonwood
tree was often the being on which my family conflicts settled. The more
independent in thought and belief I became, the more this tree became a focus.
Dad and I had an ongoing conflict/rivalry, and this tree became the symbol of our
emotional wrestling match.
As I look back at my childhood, this struggle was an
existential war. I had frequent dreams of trying to protect seedling cottonwoods
from my father’s determination to destroy them. In one dream, mom caught me
taking revenge for the seedlings he had destroyed by pulling up his vegetable
garden. Mom shamed me and took my father’s side. She always tried to keep the
peace but at my expense.
In frequent dreams, I was often a secret
witch in the magician/healer sense, who snuck in and out of that old cinder block shed beneath the Cottonwood. I wore a deep red medieval dress, because I came
from an ancient place, and no one knew about my secret life. Then one day, or
more accurately one nightmare, some zoot suit wearing criminals found my little
shed and threatened to expose my secret life, they knew it would destroy me.
On yet another dream
occasion, my father and I had a ferocious fight over the Cottonwood. He said,
“it is half dead, it must come down”, and I said,” it is half alive and I will
fight to save it until one of us collapses”. However, I was secretly afraid the
dead side would fatally infect the living side. I felt doomed. Then one day, or
rather dream, while standing near the cinder block shed beneath that Cottonwood,
I was startled when the Bluebird character from the Cinderella Ballet, flew out
of the sky and landed in front of me. After the first time I saw it danced, the
Bluebird variation became my favorite male ballet solo. It is magic when executed
by a virtuoso! This dream version of the Blue Bird was a seasoned, middle-aged
magician. He obviously had the power of flight and offered to teach it to me. When he took my hand, we flew away.
As I looked down at earth, I saw many green fields within
stone hedgerows and they were all made of semiprecious stones. Although we had launched from Denver, Colorado, this
was a bird’s eye view over somewhere on the British Isles, certainly not from where
we took off, yet It all seemed reasonable, and flying was easy while holding
the Bluebird’s hand. After we’d glided over many fields, he told me I could fly on my
own. I tried for a few minutes but then lost altitude through self-doubt and had to
take his hand again. I was weakened by an inner conflict. I was attracted to this Blue
Bird Magician, but afraid to admit it to myself, and certainly to him. He would surely discover that I was unworthy of his attention, and humiliation would make me crash.
This ariel magician came from a world I didn’t deserve to know, and he would discover that I was only a sad lonely girl child, living in an abandoned chicken shed, alienated and completely unknown to the people who lived on the tame front half of the family property. I had no true friends or family only people who knew nothing of my secret life, and didn’t want to know. Yet strangely, I had no doubt of my witch ability to heal those who asked for help with strong intention, .
However, this time the inner conflict
was not resolved, and I landed back on the dirt where the Bluebird Magician
found me. Nowadays, since cancelling regular TV service, I've gorged my mind/heart on visionary thoughts and a smorgasbord of intoxicating and intellectually challenging podcasts. Every evening, I go hunting with my Bluebird Magician. We have re established contact. They are the semi-precious hedgerows that he showed me as we flew
above them. When my mind is too full for even another bite, I turn YouTube on to favorite ballets and even dancers in their morning
class. I love to see how things are made.
Dancers have class for two hours every morning, but it isn’t
because they are immature students of dance but because Terpsichore their
goddess asks for humble worship every day. Flying isn’t easy and they must
maintain the highest fitness level to perfect their magic.
After I left home, my father cut down the big Cottonwood. I knew it was only the symbolic victim of who he was really cutting down. Until recently, I thought he secretly hated me because of disappointment that I wasn’t a boy. Yet, as an only child, I learned to be dad’s boy and mom’s girl. I loved hardware stores, mixing cement, or nailing roofing, and target practicing with rifle and bow..But I also planted and harvested our garden.
For mom, I became a good and adventurous cook and could design
and sew my own clothes, or shop for antiques. I’ve let many of my earlier skills atrophy but could reawaken
them if I needed to. Both parents were dismayed, frightened, fascinated and curious about what they were dealt in
their only child, but so was I. They loved, feared and prayed I'd outgrow being me. My very existence
threatened to bring down the wall of safe compliance they struggled against
their own nature to maintain. However, it took
me many years, to recognize that by embodying their alter ego non-compliant suppressed selves, I made it possible for them to keep their membership as keepers of the standard
norm. Inside, we were all secret agents of the Divine Magician, and we had
played our roles so long we believed it was reality.
They were Baptists and read the Bible literally. I tried to make peace with membership in that club, but I was terrified of heaven. As a youngster, I had panic attacks about the second coming of Jesus. The story was that our savior Jesus Christ one day would unexpectedly appear to take his believers to heaven. I had frequent nightmares of Jesus appearing on an angry black cloud ready to suck his followers up to heaven. I didn’t want to go. There was no one there I could wish to spend eternity with, while those I loved, and my animal family disappeared or went to hell. Nor did I want to walk eternally on jeweled streets in a lifeless paradise. A hard bleak place with no one for company but scared Sunday School students, arrogant preachers who feared that the big boss, God would detect their pretense. And many like my parents who had no joy or passion. Since I was baptized, I wouldn’t go to hell, but eternity in Heaven was only Hell-Light, to me.
Then, one night he
did appear full force. I resisted being sucked to heaven so desperately that I was turned inside out.
It was the most painful and terrifying dream I ever had, but after that this
Jesus kept his distance, and yet I was indeed turned inside out and never saw
existence, society or God with normal eyes again.
In modern parlance, my system crashed, and I had to do a hard restart, but it was not the last one. It’s happened several times, and now it’s happening again, and, dear Cottonwood I’m standing beneath you looking upward at your leafless branches, on a few surviving lower branches remaining leaves are fluttering calmly in a gentle autumn breeze. Dear Cottonwood, I know you are dying in my place. We will meet again, although I don’t know if it will be in my world of memories, or magically after the next restart.
Aho! and it is so.
