Posted on November 21, 2024 by Jenn Zatopek

The spruce trees are dying, the poet tells us at the online salon, and I can relate. We witnessed several dead trees lying around the forest floor while climbing up the lush Taos Mountains, their black decaying bark a feast for tiny orange mushrooms and golden lichen and soft green moss to grow. While hiking, I gazed upwards at the magnificent evergreens and thought, I want to be a dying tree that falls in the forest with my kin, becoming nourishment for whatever comes next. It was a beautiful thought, one that sustained me for a while till it no longer held.

But today as I write these words, I don’t want to be dying for love, even though I know intimately this is how grief works, that this is the price we pay for the risk of opening ourselves to love. I want to stay here and fight, scream my anguish at the one being left behind for the one living who has left. A birthday gift goes unacknowledged and unanswered texts disappear into nothingness. Long summer days pass interminably into weeks of cooler autumn weather with no response from the one I thought I had a close personal friendship with. The hell with love if it’s going to be this painful. 

***

The rising temperatures, the excess rains, the humid days leave spruce trees vulnerable to root rot, which means they often fall down in springtime a year after because their roots no longer sustain them. What prevents their untimely deaths are full sunshine, movement, and excellent soil drainage so the delicate roots can thrive underground.

These experiences are shared with you now so I won’t become a dead tree, collapsing under the weight of unexpressed grief and stored pain. As I make a place for grief in my heart, she reminds me of what beautiful things can emerge as I enter the wildlands, my inner landscape soaked in sorrow. Pain seeps out of me everywhere–I’m crying in the Starbucks parking lot, the art museum, the car; and I welcome grief tenderly and watch as my tears wash through the canyon of my heart, nourishing everything inside. What will grow here next?

***

Because I am an earnest woman, I picked up the still gray mouse on the sidewalk near our house on a cool summer morning with the sky pregnant with rainfall. It was a few days before we traveled north to Santa Fe, hiking in the fertile mountains in celebration of my birthday. Grabbing tissue paper, I collected the little gray mouse and walked back to our front yard garden, digging into the moist earth until I hit brown clay and dug deeper still. Placed him gently at the bottom of the narrow hole and said a prayer for an easeful transition into the mystery. 

When I saw the still mouse, I didn’t think to do anything else but bury him, giving him a proper rest, something we all long for if we come to think of it. Days pass and we return from the mountains and a tiny squash plant blooms in the dusty brown soil right above the burial spot, a bright hooker’s green stem curving elegantly out of the earth. There is living waiting to be born in the death of this dream, I think to myself. 

A sign for me of what happens when I wrap you up, these words burying you deep inside the rich, dark soil of my heart and sing praises for the dead at soul’s edge, for you and me to bloom bright in our next incarnation, on the other side of darkness into the quiet radiant light of dawn.

Image: Sage hills at Taos River Gorge State Park, New Mexico