Approaching the blaze

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey".

    October 15

     I'm trying to imagine being a tree.

     In some people's minds, I'm already there. I've been told I'm like a tree, and in all honesty, that didn't always sit well with me. Something about the solidness and immobility of the trunk of a tree, gray or brown, echoed in an unfortunate way the self-image I carried of the tall, "big-boned" adolescent in an 8th-grade class of blonde gymnasts. At least I think they were all gymnasts. 
     But I kept veering in the direction of trees as life pulled me along. Camp and canoe tripping in the North Woods first woke me to pine trees - to this day, the regal red pines that stand wild on the shorelines of rock-rimmed Ontario lakes are my absolute favorite trees. Then came forestry school for my Masters degree: I thought I was there for rare plants and ecosystem management, but I graduated with a silviculture orientation - growing trees. Returning to my home in Ohio with my fiancé, I saw the broad-leaf hardwoods growing in the rich soils of my back yard as something close to miraculous: here were cherries and beeches bigger than I could reach around with soaring canopies that I'd never noticed growing up! 
Once married, I settled in Maine where the white pines kept my heart alive in winter, soft-needled and green against the deep blue sky, the colors of earth and life. 

     I'm falling in love again just writing this.

     Autumn was a real problem though. The trees changed. They didn't seem real in the blazing reds and yellows and even maroons (some ash trees) that everyone else oggled at. I felt betrayed, I think. Green soothed my soul. These colors were gaudy. And they were also tied to two things that put pits in my stomach: back-to-school (the blonde gymnasts), and the coming of winter. I also lived in northern Ohio where winter meant slush, five solid months of lake-effect gloomy gray overcast skies, and bare gray tree twigs without one single pine or fir intervening. No green, no blue. Those fiery autumn trees could not be trusted: I knew what they meant, and I closed my heart to them.
      Living in Maine for over thirty years has gently shown me that autumn and winter have their own beauty. I will always swoon at the slow greening of spring, and revel in the warmth and aliveness of summer. But my heart has softened - a bit - to autumn and winter.

     Now I find myself living in the moment, a bearer of a cancer as yet unidentified. In my dawn prayers this morning, an answer came to a question unasked: The trees are your teachers. I blinked. I looked at the trees: reddening, golding, some still green. They are changing, and right in this moment they have stepped out of their chlorophyll kinship to be seen as individuals, unique. You are my teachers. I am changing. I am no longer in my summer. What does it mean - what does it feel like - to blaze? Does it take courage? Or is it thrust upon us like it or not? I know where this is going, in some sense: I will be stripped bare - more like released perhaps (the gentler energy of letting go) - and I will stand naked, still rooted, still reaching upward in prayer, through the dormant, raw, incubating time until spring comes. 
     But that is not now. Now is my time to walk in the forests of color, among my fellow trees, and shift from observing to sensing, separateness to belonging. Keep teaching me. Keep me alive without fear. Take me deep into what you know.