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.