I can't figure out Chapter 3 in my Writing Re-Creatively book, so I'll write on Chapter 4: Imagining myself as a tree.
The first image that came into my mind with this exercise was the birch copse a short way into the woods at The Farm. I've alluded to this before, but not in detail. And I have never thought about it as a metaphor.
I was ten-and-a-half when we moved to this old house. And I discovered my special place that first summer before we had settled in. There must have been 15 or more very young black birches, supple, shiny, with lacy leaves, in this grove. The forest floor under the trees was covered with a thick, deep green moss.
I would sneak away to this quiet place whenever I could in the summer. My favorite time in the grove was late spring, when the leaves were tiny, and the damp moss smelled like life itself. Often I would lie on my tummy, my face buried in this earthy cushion. Other times, I would stretch out on my back, my arms under my head, and dream away while the birches swayed gently in the breeze. But mostly, I would take a book, or my notebook, pencils, and ruler, and read or draw my fantasy houses.
I loved the light created by the dancing leaves. The pale green light dappled the dark ground cover. It was so clean, so pure, everything my young life was not, then. I have been entranced by light ever since.
The copse looked very different under a blanket of snow. The barren, but still shiny, trees left their own shadow patterns on the ground. The birches were never as starkly dormant as their sister maples or oaks. There was always a glow about them. On the late winter afternoons, coming back through the woods from Dottie's, I knew I was nearly home when I saw their graceful forms moving in their woodland ballet.
Clean, pure, graceful, peaceful, they represented a calm, beautiful relationship to their environment that I could never achieve for myself. And now, when a certain spring light filters through a woodlot, that same restorative feeling fleets across my brain, and any cares drift away with the breeze.
A footnote: three years ago, I met a youngster who now lives in that house and sleeps and dreams and draws in my old bedroom. We shared stories about the house and the woods; he fascinated that this white-haired old lady ever was a child, and I immeasurably pleased that another child loves the same forest that sheltered me. I asked him about the birches, the young copse of trees that are so special in my memory. He looked blankly at me, tried to accommodate me by identifying my description. Suddenly, it hit me. That was over 50 years ago! My young birches were old ladies, too!
And now I fantasize that the ballet still goes on in the spring breezes, a little slower, and little more stately, but nevertheless, as clean, pure, graceful, and peaceful as ever.