Today we all receive the gift of seeing outward from the heart of the tree, seeing out through wood to the system of veins in mid-air.

Each person around the world–in the deserts, in the cities–looks at a tree or a plant or a weed, and meditates.  We graft the tree and human worlds together: we breathe in rhythm, we pour the energy of our minds into your growth, and you increase, your leaves get shinier.  Our skin and your bark, our arms and your limbs, our hearts and your tender unseen pith, there in the holy of holies.

How often your leaves and flowers have been braided into our hair; they’ve crowned our wrestlers and poets and our best charioteers.

How often we’ve walked the trails just looking at you.  That was our day’s entertainment.  We’ve come to you churning with cortisol, made desolate by concrete, just to look peripherally at your green blur, and be with you in this moment.  It’s quiet here in the middle of your lives, on a typical day.  The sun heats the fallen pine needles…

But enough about us.

Today, like everyone, I see your xylem and phloem in the sky.  I feel your leaves on my face.  I sense the miles of roots under my feet though they rest on linoleum.

I see outward through wood, wild wood, in its natural state.

Beautiful tree, we’re so happy to welcome you.  The living room is covered with dirt and moss, twigs and acorns.  Welcome, welcome.  Can we get you anything?  Here’s a dish of rainwater.  Sit, I’ll put on the Nature Channel.

Long silence.

Just relax, sway gently.  Ah, sip that rainwater.  This is a caterpillar-free zone.

An hour for you.  A day for us.

A leaf is drifting down through the apartment air.

Long silence.

Tonight the darkness will be made of all your unified shadows, and I will fear nothing.

Before you leave, is there something of yours I can keep?  That fallen leaf–I tape it to the skin over my heart.  It decays.   So be it.  I wear the fragments.  I look at you, or your cousin, or your cousin’s cousin, and my heart, under the leaf mold, is restored.

Today is your day!  Haha!  You try to blow out the candles, but that stream of oxygen just makes them burn eternally!  Go with God, who also breathed directly into you.

What we know for sure, what we can feel in our bones, is that it all took place in the desert and the hill country. 

In the Jezreel Valley and Jericho and Jerusalem.

Among the tribes of the Canaanites.

When a god was carried from the south, from the wilderness.  A god of war and rain.

The shepherds brought their first lambs to be sacrificed on his altar. The farmers brought their first grain in early summer, their first fruits in fall.

The men were circumcised. 

Back before Ashkenazi and Ukraine, and pale skin and glasses.  Back before rabbis and bibles, before even the First Temple!

I was a Canaanite.  But not eating certain things.   

And you, who I sit with at brunch:  you were on line with me at our hilltop altar.  You lugged sacks of plums and lemons; I brought dates and persimmon, scraped from the rocky ground.

The blood of my lamb oozed onto the still wet blood of yours.

Who was our God?  Was he the god, even then, of love thy neighbor?  Of pay your farmhands?

There is no image of him up here.  Our minds work in the empty space.  Beyond the altar, the valley stretches out… 

Please bring rain so we can stay here.  Be with us, give us the advantage, as we fight for this valley.

With empty grain sacks, washing our hands, we stop for a moment to catch up, to kibbitz.  We share a local slang—the first Hebrew.

All the different subcultures and opinions made a crude body politic. The parts did not quite reject each other; the livid stitches had healed over into just skin.  We could lurch around, drink water from the stream, appreciate the flowers, grunting and cooing at them.

We had lactating breasts for the growing population, and the genitals of both sexes; we used birth control and we didn’t.

And we watched the news.

Then one night a man appeared at my bedside in the dark.  Restrained me in iron cuffs.  And for hours, he ran his fingers over me, searching out the lines between parties, between races.

I had always been indecisive, of course, but I could function.  I heard voices, but they were whispers; the overriding voice was me.  And I could control my limbs, my movements, with decent precision, passing laws meant to help.

But his fingers—it was uncanny the way he knew where to press.  As if I had scurvy, my old scars reddened, opened… 

The cognitive dissonance I’d always lived with began to shriek.  Two voices shrieking incessantly, clawing at each other.  Right there on the bed, I started to hemorrhage.  And separate.  There is my hand, bleeding from the wrist into the blanket.  To move it now would take telekinesis.

I can’t unite the voices anymore.  The man is kneeling at my bed again, his fingertips searching.  Mercifully I’m going away.  I hate him, my enemy, my destroyer.  With my last bit of consciousness, last bit of will, I vote for him.