open your heart // the trees would like to hold counsel

a multilinear tryptic about love and belonging through many visitations with my red maple elder

✼　 ҉ 　✼　 ҉ 　✼

august 25th

hello to you<3 thank you for being here. i am writing from my childhood bedroom, sitting in the rocking chair my mother breastfed me in during our first months together. it’s a perfect chair, wide for my hips and just the right height for my short legs. i feel my grandmothers with me when i rock in it.

summer has turned, and it’s the season for weaving. harvest baskets, spider webs, winter blankets, stringing up vegetables to dry in the sun. i love a rocking chair for this time, and i’m grateful to find a moment here during this retrograde, stitching a quilt of lessons from the season.

every time i return to massachusetts, i must walk the woods that raised me to a clearing where my beloved red maple rises up out of the ground, branches twisting like an outstretched hand. it’s like visiting a grandparent. i say i’ve missed them and that they look well, i lean against their trunk and caress their aged bark, noting the wear of storms and time and hungry insects on their body. we stay like this, watching the clouds float across the sky, listening to the forest buzzing. i think of something taylor asks often, how many generations does it take to belong to a place?

this walk was a treasured moment, aligned with a convening of aunties to celebrate my mami (virgo icon) ’s, 55th birthday. i arrived from catskill to a reunion of all my tias on my mother’s side, cousins and childhood friends included, as well as the adopted venezuelan, argentinian, and ecuadorian women who became our family here. our tenderness for each other makes my eyes well up. it’s the same feeling i get looking up at the new england canopy with its dappled green sky of hickory, white pine, red oak, sugar maple, sassafras, and birch. it’s the feeling of knowing i am home, because my heart is filled with recognition for the bodies i have grown up climbing, running around and playing with, looking up at, going to for comfort.

have a moment with me to thank them both— aunties and trees, for their vital role in our ecosystems. thank you trees. thank you aunties.

I start with this note about place, family, and home within the diasporic experience because in many ways this feels like the work of my life. the experience of leaving my home and people of origin as a young child oriented my sense of purpose around belonging and return, of finding many ways home. return meaning: a dance with the spiral of time and the cycles of energy and matter, in rhythm with the seasons. coming home to ourselves again and again through change, uncertainty, upheaval and transformation.

✼　 ҉ 　✼　 ҉ 　✼

november 1st

there’s a memory that i have, of a few years back, when i was sitting with the maple tree in the summertime. i remember feeling suddenly and unexpectedly beside myself, aggrieved by loss that was not my own. it was an acute feeling of separation, of being cut off from your loved ones. the tree was telling a story that this land has shared with me in many iterations, about how it has been abused and desecrated for colonial settlements, then farms, and now, for recreation. i miss my people is something we frequently mourn together.

when i visited the red maple for my mother’s birthday, i had this grief on my mind, and it coupled and swelled with seeing my friend in their declining state. i asked them if they felt like they were alone, and this was their answer:

i saw the small suckers they send out every year. i saw their sweet leaves spotted with insect bites, mottling red and green long before the other trees start to change color. i saw the great effort they put forth to keep their part in the ecosystem despite their many fallen limbs. i saw that their ailing parts were not lonely at all. ants, beetles, and termites moved in and out of the bark. lichen and moss bloomed on their branches. one of their trunks, broken by a storm long ago and stripped down by time, grew a beautiful colony of white shelf fungus that had settled there for the last few seasons. Look, they said to me, how loved these dying parts of me are, as they are taken apart, digested, and return to the soil.

i have learned with time, practice, and counsel that it happens like this with trees. when there are no words to exchange, we speak the language of the heart. last week in the bronx i attended a ceremony led by one of the most beautiful souls i know. the last part of our time together was all about communing with the trees— getting to know, together, who was around us, and offering sweet fruits, admiration, water, music, and dance. there was a beautiful, beautiful moment when a man passed us by, hand in hand with his daughter. he looked at us curiously, then remarked that the trees have many wise things to say, and he spent a moment with us talking about how he visits these trees often. one must learn, he told us, to speak their language, and i swear i felt the trees beaming in recognition.

i’ve returned to massachusetts for the first week of november, between one place and the next, tying up my season in catskill and preparing for a winter of visiting with family and friends in warmer places. i am back in that rocking chair where this tryptic began, and it is sturdy and comforting as always. i’ve just returned from ceremony with my red maple friend, and i have this on my heart, the land wants to be loved out loud. i usually have the relief of being alone in the woods when i come visit the red maple, but this time, as i was singing for them and giving offering, a few different people passed by, and i could feel how pleased the red maple was that i shared what i was doing with others.

i thank this tree who has been like a grandparent to me when mine live so far away. they teach me the same things my abuelas do about tenderness, knowing ourselves, and caring for one another. they teach me that death and coming apart is one of many ways that we come home to love.

✼　 ҉ 　✼　 ҉ 　✼

november 6th

it’s the day after the election and in the air is a strange spring. i open my window, it smells like mid april, and i run through the things i’ve heard elders and farmers say about the land and harvests this year,

no sugarbush, the trees can’t take it.

my lilacs bloomed again in october.

i’m seeing black squirrels everywhere, it’s going to be a harsh winter.

i’m writing this outside the library under a tree whose buds are ready to burst.

all morning i have been thinking about confusion. about the possibilities awaiting at the fissures of our (dis)reality, some that make me deeply afraid, some that i want to pull out, unravel, weave back together with my friends.

i think confusion is an opportunity to work through things. i feel no grief in the fall of deceit. i do feel grief at the magnolia’s rush to send sugars to her branches because it is 80 degrees in november. i want to cry and tell her no wait, please rest, it’s not time, i’m worried for the long winter ahead. but maybe she knows something i don’t. maybe she feels how bad things are getting, and her out of season buds are a faithful attempt at life.

i think, and i hope, that we can share this confusion and figure it out together. i think, and i hope, that we can cut through all the noise and listen deeply to the land.

(i take a breath from writing and turn to see my best friend asleep on the grass behind me, her cheek resting on soft hands adorned by colorful stones. just a moment ago she was venting with sharp precision like only a capricorn can, but now she is sleeping like a baby bear, and i see magnolia behind my eyes as everything bursts inside me.)

this is what i’m hearing in my heart, and i can’t explain how but i know it’s coming from the maple tree. i’ll translate as best as i can (this is my sign off, thank you for coming):

love is inevitable. when they cut down the trees love returns as moss. when the trees die love blooms in lichens. when they level and pave over the ground it sprouts in every crevice as weeds. life and belonging are a force of existence, like gravity, like the planet’s rotation, like the storms of an angry sea. they will always, always find a way, and when we cannot see a way we will make many.