the giving tree

Elementally, maybe I am Shel Silverstein's Giving Tree. I am a tree of life, sheltering and nourishing all my little ones, being both their source and their every resource. As they grow bigger, as they grow more and more into themselves, I begin to feel them reaching towards my choicer branches, towards the harder-to-reach fruit, towards the very heart of me, and I feel them asking for more and more of me--never sated, never slaked, always hungering for more of me. There are days that I feel that they'll never be satisfied until they have used up my every branch and eaten my every hard-grown apple, and finally cut me down and hauled my heart right out of me for their own purposes. They don't know it yet, what a toll has been taken, and they may never fully know it. They don't see the sap I bleed at the end of every exhausted day, when I've lost another small piece of myself that may never regrow, when I'm certain that the end game of all this great giving is for me to give until there's nothing left and I am but a stump, having lived out my life, giving and giving, and giving, and gone.

Or maybe I identify more closely with William Butler Yeats' The Two Trees. There are days when I can gaze within my own heart and see the joy and the holy branches and the merry light; and then there are days when this verse from the poem resonates so strongly in me:

Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

The ravens of unresting thought have certainly been flying to and fro in my life of late, and the glass of outer weariness is all I can raise my eyes to see. I'm trying to await the spring with patience, when I can maybe shake my leafy head again and feel the surety of my hidden root, and perhaps dower the stars again with a little merry light.

--Teri.

how can god still dance?

I saw a broken rabbit on the road, and I wondered, how can God still dance?

Wending my way down the green of a forest-canopied road this morning, breathing in the beautiful gray silence and singing hard into the quiet, I drove past this little rabbit, its perfection desecrated on the chill fog of the morning highway. It caught my breath and sent warmed tears streaming, and I was moved unexpectedly by the thought of that one tiny life brought to such a violent and graceless end. It was the first faint rumble of an earthquake of staggering realization that struck right on its heels:

If God pieced together the universe with His starry breathing, if He caught the grandest vision in all of eternity and set it into motion, if He is the deepest and highest and farthest reaches of Love itself, then somewhere in the clockless face of existence, He must have cried over this little rabbit, and the millions of little rabbits that perished before it, and the sparrows, and the cattle on a thousand hills, and the deaths of a thousand stars, and your heart, and mine.

How, then, can God still dance?

I assume God is a fabulous dancer; how else could He have painted the great spectacle of the heavens and the rush of unbelievable blue in the oceans and the incomprehensible green of the fern? How else could He have put the tiny sparkle in your eyes, or the beauty in your upturned hand, or the curve of your lower lip? Only a dancing God could have given arch to our feet, and movement like flight when we swim, and grace like swans when we die. He must dance at every birth, at every epiphany, at every slap of a whale's tail on the water, at every work of art, at every pebble on the beach, smoothed and shaped and shining. He must.

The universe, in all its entropy, in all its dying glory, in all its rebirth and failure and rebirth again, is rife with dancing and mourning, and even dancing while in mourning. Maybe only a great God of the universe, limitless in mind and fathomless in heart, could really understand how it is possible--or even necessary--to keep up the fantastic dance, even when the heart breaks, and the sorrows of a hurting world are crying out.

Maybe God can dance when we can't. Maybe God can dance because we can't. Maybe God can dance for us until He teaches us all to dance again. And maybe we'll all learn someday to dance even while we cry.

--Teri.