The Meeting

Letter II ~ Late Summer

Dear Yggdrasil,

I love sitting between your roots and looking out over the valley and wondering who sat here before me or if I am the first.

What were they thinking? Did they feel timeless like me and can I meet them in that timelessness?

I love your rough bark and your deep roots that give strength and the carpet you’ve left behind over the years. I love the way the light shines through you and reflects…

Were you planted as a tiny beech nut by a sapphire-feathered Jay? Or a child who played in this landscape centuries ago, growing old before your stems separated? Who will come after me, and how many thousands have you seen pass, even on this remote bank . How many leaves have you shed like old memories over the years? They have become the soil beneath my fingers, from which you draw fresh breath.

What you have let go has never truly left you. I wish the same could be true for me, that the things I have lost, forced to let go, could stay with me and unfurl again in a new season. Too often things and people who have faded, seem now out of reach forever, like nutrients washed away after a drought.

But in your community, even those fragments lost to you will become part of the fabric of another, who will regenerate them, before they return to you through the drop of cool rain on a misty autumn day.

This is what I wish for myself and for all those who have lost.

Let me know if you have ever been comforted by a tree…