The Month of Falling Trees

The Month of Falling Trees, 2020

September has been a month of falling trees.

This photo is the backyard of my husband’s childhood home in Olean, NY, and the opening, where a line of gigantic pines had stood just days before, now reveals a two-story house. During our visit, I saw many trees down across Olean. Around our tiny village of Trumansburg, 120 miles away, I had noticed the same phenomenon happening.

Early in the month of September, I was walking the dog in our neighborhood when an enormous Maple branch came crashing down behind a house as I passed. The sound was so incredibly loud that I was certain an entire tree had fallen. I knocked on the door of the house, and when no one answered, I peeked around to their backyard and spotted a tangled mass of limbs and leaves. I could see from this vantage point that it was not the entire tree but a single branch that had split away and come crashing down. The branch was enormous on the ground and seemed much bigger than its sister branches above. It had narrowly missed the house.

When it happened, I had been walking the dog, and I was completely distracted in my thoughts. I wasn’t really there walking the dog in that moment, but rather ruminating on the events of the past in an effort to make sense of something in my mind. The fallen branch woke me up in that moment. Where had I been? In that instance, it made me think of a book I had read by the Tibetan Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart. That book had been a gift for me at a not-so-distant time in my life when my sense of identity collapsed underneath me following the birth of my son.

I had been like the tree trying to hold onto branches that were ready to fall. Here I was doing it again. I was trying to hold up the branches, thinking I could somehow fix the feelings I didn’t like. What Chodron says is that we need to use these moments to wake up. If we repel the thoughts and feelings we don’t want to experience, we don’t leave space for life to move through us. We need to accept sorrow as readily as we except happiness because joy is the largest container that can hold it all, if we allow it to. We block our joy if we don’t accept the whole range of human emotions that need to move through us.

We can’t put the trees back once they’ve come down. We can wish for a different outcome, but that’s futile. What we should really be asking ourselves is, “What can we see now that the trees have fallen?”