Ancient cedars

The air, sweet with pine and soft hush after the chainsaw’s whine is stilled. Carl is guide to the lively, sharp-toothed blade slicing green wood that will be my winter’s comfort. Once split, one season of sun and the keen screams of wind raw from the river, strips the living water from these felled trees. I am looking at the decadent center of each round when I hear Ben talking about the beached grey whale lying dead at Tsawassen’s tide line. He is telling us that sometimes if bulldozers or backhoes cannot drag the 50 tons of carcass close enough for the sea to slip her waves beneath the gravid weight, men thrust dynamite inside each orifice and cut open still more wounds to bear their explosives. Blubber, bone and blood blown sky-high, shattering this lover of water, this song-ful leviathan of the deep. Warm, red stain of a mammal like you and I, now scattered across the sand like the pieces of Osiris by his brother. I am shocked into stillness. I can see the bones shining, suddenly exposed to air.
I seek refuge in the rings of this tree. I ground myself in round circles telling me of its history, the dark strands woven with the light, the transforming of wind and earth and rain, the turning of day and night into something of grace and green. Some say whales carry the memories of all the world inside them. In what dark cavity can they find a place for this?
Clay breaks silence in a whisper. I hear his reverence. Words set adrift in the air like an offering. Sentences compressed like the incense of trees. Ancient Canadian trees.Cedars twisted in limb and gnarled with age like bonsais. Some, he said, seeded themselves in tiny crevices of rock before the first Crusade. Long before Columbus touched the continent those cedars were sipping air from their tenacious holds in cracks scarring rock ledges of the Niagara Escarpment.




Wiry roots wound tight in grains of soil fallen from the talons of eagles. I wonder why I have never heard of these trees? They possess the inner secret of how to thrive in the earth's cracked seam. The way they live 2000 years on air and emptiness. Tempests raging all around them.There must be something in the heartwood itself. Something they must take inside them like the rock takes in the light. It makes me think of those wise women and men who sit still and let everything flow through them. Peacefully abiding. Meditating in the mouths of darkness with the eye of the heart wide open. Opening the way for vast emptiness. Opening the way for the infinite moment. Round and whole and perfect, turning eternity's golden wheel. Opening the way for the light.