Exposed

My dad said this might be the big cottonwood’s last fall if he can’t get some more water to it. He said he needs to buy a bunch of fifty-foot hoses and line them up and out and down to the dying tree. 

My mind flashes to an image of a makeshift fire brigade passing buckets of water from hand-to-hand, water sloshing painfully over the side of the bucket with each passing hand. The urgency is there, and so is the likelihood of failure, and so are the other priorities of greater concern than the great half-alive tree.

It breaks my heart, how this earth will grow you and then let you die. The letting-you-die part goes something like this: an old irrigation ditch that used to flow runs dry and stays dry for decades too long, the rainwater that used to be enough no longer is, what once was the right location now is not. 

But still, the green-and-gold branches mix loudly with the gray branches and those black birds, I don’t know what kind. We want so much to live even when we know what we’ve lost, even when we practice the little deaths each day.

Teach us how to die now, so that we do not have to wait until our final death to learn what it means to live, I say, mumbling some version of a prayer I’ve held. Sleep is a little death. So is surrender. And they are offered to us each morning and night. Even with all that water, it may die. Even with all that water, it may live.

This morning the La Platas are turning a dusty purple and the sun is breaking through the clouds and the smoke from all the fires, streaking down on it, shimmering even. Spruce, piñon, cottonwood, greatest love. All here. And me, with my hand over my heart, wanting to touch the part that has been broken by this tree. 

We get to be here, exposed, if we’ll let ourselves, in this place where the blue sky is always contrasting what is dead and what is alive

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 48