On Winter Solstice 2018 Welcome to My World
Welcome to My World
By Mike Evans
Welcome to my world. I live in a house with walls, on the north side of a street, in an old town, with modern traffic all around. You come from a mountain where there are unimaginably dark nights, bright quiet days, and the wind is the only thing moving through with any regularity. My place is somewhat noisy. And busy. Yours is generally quiet, with the most interruptive sounds coming from the Clark’s nutcrackers and their scandalous screeching between forest and domestic project, as they build their big sloppy nests. The mountain lion’s movements are silent.
In your place, the patterns and rhythms are detectable at a slower pace, and the changes are subtle. I use an alarm on my iPhone to wake me up each day before dawn. Your place is on the rebound from a huge fire, where like always, your days become seasons transitioning to years, then decades and then centuries. Before the fire, I figured your forest to be mostly 120 years old, with a few sentinels over 300. And I need coffee within 20 minutes of getting out of bed.
From the rings I counted on the stump protruding all forlorn in your forest, you were about 8 years old. And your severed top, the Christmas “tree” we strapped to the top of our Subaru, about 8 feet tall. You grew up at a healthy pace. Sorry about my life-ending sawcut. As one of my justifications, I insist that where you had sprouted in the driveway, felling you would be inevitable and eventual, and at least this year you would fit in our living room.
This is now the fourth year I have mused over a keyboard regarding the cutting, transporting and decorating of the top half of a tree that had been growing peacefully and without incident on our little wild plot of land called North Peak Canyon Ranch. (“On Winter Solstice 2015, 2016, 2017”). The Cedar Fire in 2003 reduced everything to ash, but from the ashes sprang up beauty… and so commencing in 2015, we revived our old tradition of bringing home a Christmas tree from the Cuyamacas. The wonderful incense cedar seedlings we have cut over the years have all be around 10 years old at harvest, vigorous and healthy, and suddenly “repurposed” in death to bring joy to our family and friends. Incidentally, we were able to endure that 12-year stint after the fire when we settled for store bought plantation trees, giving the forest a chance to recover.
Cutting a wild tree is a moral issue, but then every scheme or action we might undertake, if it involves wilderness, involves morality. And honor.
For our family, Christmas is a time of celebration. We include the tree as part of our ceremony, our commemoration, an annual touchstone that includes lights, ornaments, music, presents, ribbons and bows, a whole house redecorated (again), aromatic tea, amazing food, happy faces. Like the actual Christmas story itself, our tree brings to mind, (as I sit by my fire over this laptop keyboard) birth, life, purpose, death by sacrifice, new birth, new life, new purpose, and a common appreciation transcending into personal ineffable gratitude.
So, dear Calocedrus decurrens, welcome to my world and thank you. Not so much for giving your life, for the fact is I took it, but for the huge reminder of how God turns ashes into beauty, will transform every dry place into a watered garden, truly bringing life out of death. It’s the completion of the Christmas story, Jesus born into this world to die, rise again, so we can live forever.
Including you dear tree, as part of our family this season is a privilege for which we are thankful. I hope you will find the patterns, rhythms, sounds, sights and smells of my world to your liking. Every time I visit your mountain I’ll look for the stump we left behind and remember you, even long after, in my world, your top has withered and died.
You will be alive in our hearts forever, and we will do our best to keep your wilderness world intact. And it will be an honor to treat this goal as a moral affair.
