prophecy of the flowering trees

We walk around drunk on flowering fruit trees. It seeps under doors and finds us in bed, filling bellies before breakfast with dreams of wild plum juice dripping from our lips.

It would be sacrilege to drive with the windows anything but all the way down, letting candied cherry perfume roll through the car in pregnant clouds. The whole body inhales, is taken.

There is no other word for it than intoxication, and there is nothing else to do than to be brought to your knees in supplication, in the throes of such unbearable, passionate, juice-lust. This time of year in northern New Mexico, we live with eyes glazed, full of simultaneous longing and satiation, all secretly sharing the same lover. But it’s no secret at all, the perfumed trees blooming madly from the roadsides.

And these things,
that live only in passing, they understand
that you praise them. Fleeting, they look to us,
the most fleeting, for help.
They hope that within our invisible hearts
we will change them entirely into—
oh endlessly—into us! Whoever we finally are.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Ninth Duino Elegy)

Isn’t this the story of all springtimes? And what more are we here to do than to be seized by this beauty, to be taken into the dark flowering mysteries of Earth, and to let ourselves be shaped by those creative hands. To let this mystery seep into us, fully.

To be so moved by it, we become permanently scented.

A few springs ago I was driving through Santa Fe, in the old part of town near Canyon road, where the fruit trees are ancient, twisting amongst cracked adobe walls. I drove slowly through narrow streets, breathing the flower-thick air, letting each single fruit tree take me into its blossoming world. The stately dream of apricot, the witchy apple, the impossible pink cloud of cherry.

And my very favorite of them all, the unruly and gnarled native wild plums, whose perfume is effervescent and more heavenly than anything I can imagine, who grow in ditches, feral, cut back every year and relentlessly emerging again as a billion world universe of stars, bearing fruit that drips like purple rubies raining onto every road. The most generous and beautiful god I’ve ever met, and my favorite scent on planet earth.

I continued on my impromptu driving tour, and suddenly came upon the most exquisite old cherry plum tree, in full flowering. I could not believe her beauty. She struck my heart like perfumed lightning. Her glory was lunar, laced with the faintest pink of glowing dawn. There was a car right behind me, so I resisted the urge to slam on the brakes, instead I shouted out the window, “You are SO BEAUTIFUL!!!” to the tree as I rolled by.

At that instant, I heard a little granny’s voice yell back, “Oh my heavens, thank you!”

I nearly choked in disbelief that the tree had spoken back to me. After all these years of talking to trees, had one finally spoken back to me in audible English?? I mean, this was literally my life’s wildest dream coming true.

But then I saw her, a very real woman, on the sidewalk right beneath that cherry plum tree. She was waving at me, and smiling. I had been so taken by the tree that I hadn’t seen this little old lady standing right next to it. From the sideview mirror, I saw her face was still beaming, eyes grinning under a lunar orb of curled white hair, having just received those loving words I had yelled to the tree. “You are so beautiful!” this woman heard me call to her as I drove by.

Realizing the uncanny mix up, I laughed out loud, I shook my head, tears sprang to my eyes. A million mysteries hung before me like ripe fruit in trees. I recalled the old woman’s moon-like orb of white hair, which mirrored perfectly the round million-petaled moon of the cherry plum tree.

I began to ask the sorts of questions that can only be spurred by our willingness to speak with trees in the first place. Did this woman exist at all? Was she an apparition of the cherry plum tree spirit? Could anyone else see her but me?

More likely, I decided, the woman was real, and the tree had orchestrated this exchange. Perhaps, the tree had made sure to catch my eye at that very instant, shining with extra brilliance, in order to help deliver a gift to this dear old lady— the blessing of being called beautiful by a stranger passing by.

After a moment of letting my mind flip through the possibilities that could have led to this impossibly timed exchange, both hilarious and also tender, I froze with a new understanding. Could it be possible that this was a precious gift the tree had also given to me? I became quite certain: the tree had orchestrated this loving connection between two humans, strangers, who each had something precious to offer the other.

After decades of speaking to trees, of loving them like family, writing poems to them, making offerings at their feet, I had always accepted their arboreal silence as their way of loving me back: But this particular tree had made sure I finally received an audible reply.

I saw the vision of that glorious flowering cherry tree flash before me again. I smiled through my tears, and whispered, Oh my heavens, thank you.

I’ll admit, it is possible that it was all a random coincidence, of a white-haired elder out for a walk, who just so happened to be passing under a flowering cherry plum at the very same instant I spoke to the tree. Perhaps, beyond anything else, this is just the sort of mischief that inevitably unfolds when humans start talking to trees.

I suppose all that matters is that the encounter moved me deeply, and that it touched this woman’s heart as well, and that the tree was part of our exchange of love. I think we largely underestimate the unstoppable benevolence radiating from the trees, and their sincere longing to see humans thrive.

What do you think?