“[T]he seeds we seek are here already, but we are not here. When we are here, the seeds will begin to appear, for we first must make fertile ground for them to want to appear, and to do that there are any number of things you and I can go towards, maintain, and live by if we have the dedication.”
-Martin Prechtel, “The Unlikely Peace at Chuchumaquic”
This old tree stands on a hill with others, branches outstretched like arms, towering above us.
We’ve cut down other trees to burn in the stove or to make mushroom logs, but we’re not taking this one. If it was human flesh, of course, the nearly half-inch diameter hole my daughter is making with my grandfather’s hand-crank drill would bleed horribly. But this is not flesh and blood. It’s wood and sap, and the wound we make is so small. Wood can heal from such wounds.
The hole, less than a pinky deep, immediately starts weeping sap, and my daughter and son take turns licking the wound. I ask them to pause, and scrape the chaff out of the hole with a twig, then help my son tap a spile into it with the back of a hatchet.
Again they take turns letting drops of sap fall into their mouths – as all kids everywhere for all time have done when tapping maple trees. They insist I do the same, then we hang a bucket from the tap, attach a lid over the bucket, and listen to the ping, ping, ping of sap on tin.
We move to the next tree and begin drilling another wound.
***
I’ve heard of weeping icons.
In a church somewhere, a piece of wood, painted with an image of the Mother of God, one day begins weeping fragrant oil that streams down the icon like tears. I’ve not see the phenomenon, but it happens. I imagine that if I did see it, the experience would be similar to the experience my children have with the maple.
I drill a hole, tap in a spile, hang a bucket and lid, and move on.
They wound a tree, eager for the gift that will come of it, then delight in the drops of sap. I am focused on the task while they are lost in wonder, licking bark. I ask them to help me with the next hole and they ask me to taste this one.
I do, and of course I can feel what they feel. Who can’t?
Wonder of wonder this wood that weeps, these children who taste.
***
At the breakfast table the next morning, after our prayer and along with our eggs, we drink cold, uncooked sap from the maples on the hill.
When I was a kid, I tell them, not only did I never taste real maple syrup, not only was the maple syrup we ate fakery – made with corn syrup, food coloring, unpronounceable words and zero maple sap, if they can believe such a thing existed and still does – but I didn’t even know maple trees made sap in late winter. And not only did I not know, but nobody I knew tapped maples. Can they imagine, I ask them, not knowing these things, never tasting sap?
My wife, who is out this morning, is generally the much-needed tempering agent during such lectures. How much of these things do they need to know? How much is even worth writing about? I’m never sure. I think they need to know a little about the factory culture that forgets everything. We need to have some awareness of the current delusion, to remember that little plastic women still sit on grocery store shelves, filled with amber-colored deceit.
But we’re drawn to God through love, not fear, and one taste of homemade maple syrup generates such love. It really does. If only all children could venerate the wounds of a weeping maple in late winter.
***
“Thank you, tree,” says the old farmer, the elder brother of our close family friend who is elsewhere in the woods.
He is holding my four-year-old daughter’s hand. Before them towers a maple, weeping sap into a bucket. My daughter looks up at him and the maple, hugely smiling at both. Hand in hand, they walk to the next maple and he takes the bucket off the hook, pours it into a five-gallon jug, then hangs it back up.
“Thank you, tree,” she says, and looks up at him wide-eyed. “Thank you, tree,” he repeats.
That was years ago. Now my daughter is almost 11-years old, and the old farmer has also gotten older, too old to walk the woods with us anymore. Healed-over wounds make rings around all the maples we’ve tapped. They, too, have gotten older.
My daughter drills the wound. My son taps in the spile. I move on, but my daughter calls me back.
“Daddy,” she says, “aren’t you going to thank this tree?”
I’m not like that old farmer. I feel inauthentic in such things, feel tension with my inner hippie.
“Of course I am,” I say to her, grateful for a family who can temper my complexes.
I walk back to my children, then give that wooden mystery, that weeping revelation that towers on the hill of Creation above our house, a gentle kiss on the bark.
Beautiful
This is beautiful. I understand you are fairly new to Orthodoxy(as am I) but let me so bold as to say that Orthodoxy could use a little more tree kissing.