Who knew Redwood trees – some of the oldest, largest, most imposing creatures in the world – could seem so fragile? I hiked in a Redwood forest last weekend with friends. What I noticed first was the unnatural blackness of charred trees and brush. “Has there been a forest fire recently? Why do the trees look burned?” I asked, my head making full nods, eyes traveling from my feet on the trail to the impossibly tall trunks, rising so high that their tops couldn’t be seen. They simply disappeared into the sky. One of my hiking companions explained. “The trees undergo controlled burns. The reason why Redwoods grow so wide has to do with forest fires throughout history that burned their outer layers and the trees that survived regenerated, expanding and growing in the process.” He continued in this style of a flawless lecture, as though he were reading from a Wikepedia article verbatim. “The rangers here want these Redwoods to be as wide as the ones up north to attract more tourists, so they have regular fires in an attempt to reproduce this effect.” I walked and listened, observing the trees as he spoke. Many of them clearly did not survive these so called controlled burns. The fires had hollowed them out, leaving them standing as strange caves, the trunks open like curtains at the bottoms so one can walk inside and stare up into black voids.
Nature herself had set the precedent for this idea. Forest fires occurring naturally from environmental elements had burned the outer layers away, causing trees in the north to regenerate and expand, deepen their roots, grow. This process gave them the sizeable beauty that draws people. This process made them, effectively, a business.
My gut reaction was outrage. Who are these people who dare to lay claim to a forest? To create spaces in parking lots and camp sites to sell? To build snack shops and offices with maps and entrance fees? Nature is not business! It does not belong to investors or banks. Nature is the most raw, most high form of art. Nature is food. Nature is home. It needs to be available to everybody and it needs to be everywhere. This was the angry rant stumbling in my gut as I hiked. But even as it came into my mind and started to form words of protest, it was silenced by the sharp brightness of sun rays cutting their way into the forest, bouncing off surfaces like echos. The whole thing struck me as sad and beautiful all at once. Also, metaphorically potent.
Of course it’s fire that yields expansion. I have always known this to be true. So true in fact, that I find it the only way to live. I was raised in the fire. When fire comes, I stand in it. Face into it. Burn. When it subsides, I regenerate, reorganize, expand. Artists, writers, musicians, lovers, passionate people of all types are familiar with this phenomenon and equally as drawn to it. Those of us who see its beauty as well as the sadness it contains know that it’s all necessary to the process. The dark is worth the light. Or rather, the pair is worth the whole. A life lived fully, we contend, (a life worth living at all) is spent pushing the boundaries of that delicate balance between the fire that brings expansion and the fire that consumes. Sometimes, no, often, in the pursuit of expansion, we take flame throwers to ourselves and find that tipping point, as if it were what we’d been looking for all along. Expansion. Consumption. How far is too far?
The trees know.
There was a lifeless one at the halfway point of our hike, its trunk had fallen across the creek at the bottom of a water fall to form a narrow footpath. It was high enough up over the rocks and water to be crippling if fallen from. Playfully, I dared a guy in our group to cross it. He did so promptly, without much thought, moving easily across. Watching him made me want to do it, so I stepped on the trunk at the base (it started lower then ramped up to a higher ground) and walked out on it like a plank until I was nearly over the scary part with the water and rocks far below. I held onto a nearby branch and felt my legs go shaky from the thought of letting go and crossing, hands free to the other side. My friend, Andrea, the only other female in the group, warned me not to do it. “It’s not worth it,” she said, “you could fall.” She waved me down, shaking her head in a warning. The guy who crossed already told me to try it the other way, from the top down, it would be easier that way. But I didn’t want the easier way. I was terrified to cross – I saw myself with crumpled, broken legs and a bleeding head at the bottom of the ravine – but I also couldn’t turn back.
“I can’t do it,” I said. Andrea saw my inner struggle.
“Come down,” she said.
“You can’t do it come down,” one of the guys said. That was it, now I had to do it.
“It’s silly, it doesn’t mean anything, just come down. Don’t do it,” Andrea said.
“You know if you tell me that I just feel like I have to do it,” I said.
“You can’t do it, you’re just a woman. Just get down here where you belong and make us food,” another of the guys said, provoking me. I stood there a while longer, looking across, looking down, feeling the fear but not wanting to let it stop me. Somewhere inside I knew I wouldn’t fall but the chance that I might was there, and safety seemed like the saner option. The whole group was watching, waiting for me to do it or not do it. Maybe it was the pressure. Maybe it was my affinity for danger, another byproduct of the fire. I let go of the branch and stepped off. I crossed the trunk easily. I felt rooted into it, solidly balanced with no chance of falling lest I fling my body from it with force. On the far side I stopped too soon, attempting to get down when it was still too high but over the path. The clapping of the group subsided and they directed me to keep going, through some hanging brush to the very top where the trunk met the sloped land. The distraction and confusion made me almost fall when standing back up and shoving through the brush, but my fall wouldn’t have been far by then and the fear was gone.
Later in the hike, I was reflecting on the idea of fear, how it’s almost always associated with ignorance – we fear what we don’t know. Even when it’s primal fear, we fear the ultimate unknown of death. Or of pain. The pain of adversity of any kind and the pleasure of overcoming it is just another manifestation of the fire that brings expansion. Over these thoughts floated a voice, that of one of the guys in our group. He spoke with a thick Italian accent and the fragment of the sentence he was saying sounded like: “she’s wiggling between my penis and sadness.” I knew I must have heard him wrong but what an odd, funny thing to say. I laughed as I asked him, repeating what it sounded like. He laughed and said, “HHAAPEEENESS, not penis.” What a difference one misunderstood word makes! The misunderstood phrase sounded like an amazing title to me, and right away I knew it would be the name for this blog post. Not relevant, but amazing still. Now I think, after all, it is relevant.
While we hiked on laughing about it, I saw the light slicing through the trees again, bending around branches to shine on charred, hollowed trunks and healthy ones and growing ones. Some dying or dead, some expanding before my eyes. They were erect testaments of expansion and consumption, fear and fire, the sadness inside the beauty. They were the divine trilogy made manifest: the light, the dark, and the great unknown. Happiness and sadness are two of millions of names for halves of a round whole; the infinite round. The joy of the ancient trees in their expanded glory is scarred with pain – the pain that it took to keep growing. The park rangers with their controlled burns might have grossly misunderstood this perfect expression of nature. And in their attempts to mimic this phenomenon, they misapplied the expression. Trees that they meant to grow perished instead. They missed the true meaning and value of the infinite round and the cost was dear.
Maybe that’s a stretch, but still. The title is too good not to use.
Let me put it one more way:
Driving yesterday, the sky was blotched and bruised with dense clouds, darker farther out. In the distance, I thought I saw the blurred streaks of rain, how it looks from far away, like the clouds themselves are dropping in tendrils toward the earth. As I drove closer, I saw that it wasn’t rain but rays of cloud-filtered light turned nearly gray. The picture grew more dramatic by the minute, the sky a canvas for an evolving work of epic art. The beauty was in the contrast. The contrast fed by the balance of light and dark, which never stopped changing.
The infinate round.
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