Making Peace With the Trees
When the weather reveals the human animal
Snow and I have a long and complicated relationship.
I’ve lived at the base of the mountains my whole life and snow isn’t uncommon, but it’s rare enough to be an event that causes complicated roadways and mad dashes for provisions. We don’t have plows. The roads aren’t pre-treated for anything — we’re lucky to have cavernous potholes repaired. My favorite game is closing my eyes and feeling the difference in the asphalt, jarring to smooth, as I drive over the South Carolina and North Carolina border.
In this region, we’re all complicit in the hoarding of bread and milk before winter weather happens although no one can exactly say why we do we this. Is it for cereal? Is it for snow cream? Is it because we’re pared down to the basics when it snows and we’re subconsciously longing for our grandmother’s pantry? Who knows.
My mother left home in the snow and I didn’t really know her until we were adults. She’s lived with me at the farm long enough for us to have forgiven each other through the benediction of doing chores together during snowfalls and other extraordinary weather events. When it was the two of us alone handling feed and water, cleaning the stalls, we’d reach an atmosphere of Grey Gardens by day four, trapped with the cats in a crumbling mansion of our own making.
Now Christopher lives with us, lending a dose of logic to our suppositions, a compounded interest of technical skill that keeps Mom and I from the mania of genetically predisposed catastrophizing.
If the pipe bursts, he can fix it. If we start to spin out, he tells a joke and brings us back. He knows to bring string so he can find his way out of the labyrinth of wind and rain and ice accumulation. Left to our own devices, mom and I would mark the path with breadcrumbs and stop what we’re doing to marvel at the birds.
Most of my life I’ve had to rage my way steadily into the practical specifics of living. It’s hard to get lost in stories when someone needs to be sure everyone is fed. And while I’m not planning on totally embracing my inner wild woman completely anytime soon, Christopher’s careful watch on the details of life-ing affords me coveted moments of no longer having to be in control.
I didn’t know this gift was occurring, the way Christopher gave me space to cope until I crashed hard after Hurricane Helene. I’m still recovering physically from my body giving me no choice but to rest, to be still. I’ll continue to work with doctors to find answers, but all the downtime has given me mighty time for reflection.
I have a habit of stopping all motion when an actual, or metaphorical, storm is heading my way.
I noticed my slow descent into inertia as the weather forecasts built into a frenzy leading to this week’s snowfall. I had fifteen things that I needed to be doing this morning but I sat by the window and waited for the first flakes to start falling.
Weather shifts make me stop what I’m doing and listen. They, like Christopher, take care of the details so I can sink into my wildness.
Sometimes those details look like a soft snow collecting on the tree limbs. Sometimes those details look like entire mountainsides stripped of trees.
I watched my horse people all over the world go into action while fires tore through LA, as the fires still burn as I write this. It’s too early to say how many animals and humans were rescued — will still be rescued — from those fires or to tally what all has been lost. What I do know is that these winds and flames are stripping away all pretense and reducing people down to their essence.
The leaders at the heart of community action in Appalachia after Hurricane Helene, without missing a beat of their local, tireless work, began to trade resources and knowledge so there will be hay delivered and people fed long before the big organizations and their slow moving wheels get going in California.
This is our new normal as the weather and the elements bash us. I’ve worked outside for thirty years. I dare any farmer to tell me that the climate isn’t different than it was at the turn of the millennia. In this new normal, catastrophe isn’t something we hear about on the news. It’s something we’re experiencing firsthand in our previously safe and comfortable neighborhoods.
The new normal asks people to go into action and help without stopping to debate or ask questions. We don’t have time for that nonsense anymore. The time is long gone for us to lend aid with a dose of self-righteousness and self-importance because the most comfortable of us today may need food and supplies tomorrow.
We’re in this together.
I’d never wish calamity on anyone but if we have no choice but to live in an environment we’ve ravaged, one that is speaking back LOUDLY — the treasure at the core of this labyrinth is the chance we have to finally take care of each other, to show up and offer help, to do some good.
I made cups of Turkish coffee as the snow fell this weekend. I encouraged Christopher to flip his tiny mug over when he was finished so the remaining sludge would filagree down the side leaving signs and symbols for me to interpret.
I sat with the grandmothers after dinner in Istanbul. I listened to their chatter over deserts and cigarettes, fluttering their hands at me to flip my cup so they could read my essence in the coffee, so they could give me some knowledge of the future to keep me on a straight path, to encourage me to make good choices.
Reading fortunes has always been a woman’s work of condensed ethics, an instruction manual for the near-sighted, a way of bargaining for virtue and hope.
In Christopher’s cup, I saw the image of a tall figure reaching down to help another person up. That’s what Christopher does anyway, all the time, taking care of other people. That’s who he is. He was born that way. The rest of us have to learn and work and strive for it. Christopher is also not very fun to read coffee for because he’s literal and doesn’t deal in metaphor. He deals in facts. That’s the kind of person you want beside you in a crisis.
Christopher’s mother lives on the slopes of Kīlauea in Hawaii — a fifteen-minute drive from one of the world’s most active volcanos.
The people on the island know what it’s like to live with threats of lava, earthquakes, and tsunamis but when a vent opens in Kīlauea and molten rock pours out — a window into the center of the earth — islanders glory in catching a sight of the glowing, red heat. They don’t deny the threat of the volcano’s capability for widespread destruction, but they honor her fury and live in balance with her.
They read the signs. They watch the world around them and they listen to what it has to say.
Aloha is a living concept of care and kindness born from the uncertainty and beauty of nature.
Caring for the island is a way of life in Hawaii. Ecology is a living breathing philosophy of being on a tiny plot of land far from any continent, a paradise that could be swallowed at any moment.
We’re on big land in the continental US and that vastness gives us a false sense of security.
We act differently when we’re not sleepwalking in the comfort of our assumptions. We act differently when our communities are flooding and burning. For many of us, in the moments of deep crisis, it’s the first time we realize are a part of a community at all — or that we need to find a community fast.
Horse people have always known this, for good and bad, because our treasures live in herds and we’re always one night of colic away from loss. Most of us carry a halter in our vehicles in case we encounter a loose horse on the road — this happens more often than you might think.
Another curious change I’ve noticed in a life spent working outside is people’s relationship to weather. We have an arsenal of barn lessons to teach on rainy days when the arena is soup. Riding isn’t our focus on sunny days. We want people to learn how to talk horse (and read and write and listen in horse) and this begins and ends on the ground.
When I first started teaching riding people weren’t afraid of rain, but now I have people texting me on a Monday worried about arriving to find mild showers on a Friday.
We’ve forgotten that we weren’t designed for buildings, that the natural world is our original home.
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The snow is still softly falling here in South Carolina. The trees and the power lines are so far holding up under the weight of the weather.
I’ve blamed the snow most of my life for taking my mother away from me, but I see now that it’s taken the snow and the rain and the wind to bring her back.
How can we allow the wind and the fire and the waves to knit us back together?
And then how can we continue to stay together in times of quiet abundance? How do we live in balance with each other and the earth?
Like the grandmothers reading coffee over rose cakes and cigarettes, how do we learn to recognize the signs so that we can urge others to take action? And how can we be ready to help when we see a need?
I needed a gentle storm, like this snow, a quiet storm, to remind me back into my love affair with the natural world after Hurricane Helene. I have the luxury of having a warm home to return to after breaking ice in water buckets, but many people in Appalachia are still unhoused. The uncertainty of FEMA hotel vouchers are making matters worse.
Tamar Reno writes of survivor’s guilt, how it grows like kudzu, how we shouldn’t feed it.
Horses have a primal reaction to the sound of cracking branches. Their bodies urge them to run before a falling tree crushes them, yet they still stand beneath the shade of a tree and graze in calm weather. Tamar is always guiding us toward how the horses remember us back into a connection with ourselves and the land around us.
I think of this as I leave the warm house on this snowy day and wander into the snow-filled forest.
It’s time to make peace with the trees.
I invite you to do the same. The storms around you may be raging or gentle but the trees and the birds and the dirt hold the seeds of our human animal and the natural world is pleading with us to witness and relate — as we re-learn how to bear witness to our relation with other humans.
We are a part of the web — but it’s easy to believe we’re something other, something separate.
As I go about my business feeding hay and checking waters on this snow-hushed afternoon, my heart is aching for everyone suffering in California. It’s aching for all the people in the mountains above me who face the snow and the cold very differently as they rebuild their lives. The ache is laced with awe for the angels and lightworkers showing up for their communities in ways large and small. The ones who are showing us all the way into what it means to come together.
Let’s gather each other’s stories and hold them close.
The snow rests on the flat holly leaves. Ice edges the pond, pooling at the beaver dam. The imprint of my boots in the snow shows me coming and going. I’ll stay on this path for as it takes for me to make my peace with the trees.
Love,
Kim
Rest in the calmness