This week I watched the towering dead China Berry release her brittle-bone branches one by one. The sheer magnitude of her ginormous limbs crashing to the ground at the pull of a chainsaw was both terrifying and astounding, saddening and liberating. In her destruction the thunderous roar announced her decent in a most chilling way. A powerful scream echoing her departure from the sky she once stood magnificently within, pulling wisdom from the moon, life from the sun, strength from the earth, offering home and nest to many, offering play, shelter and tender memory to a tree-hugging family. Now a surreal pocket of ether hovers in the space she once graced, so eerily empty even the birds seem to be mourning. Yet, a curiously luminous blue yonder opens up as the rays of sun are now learning to cast light in new way on the garden below, and plants and flowers shift their alignment to adjust to new context to which they will grow. The lizards, ants, beetles, snails and spiders have scattered, an ecological system brilliantly adapting to the end of an era and reinventing life from the innate knowledge of nature’s resiliency.
This process is reminding me let go of a false sense of control, old beliefs, old ways; to adapt and to trust that optimal growth comes from the disintegration of that which is not healthy.
A grieving magic is being spun from the laws of the universe and I breathe it in as I wipe tears from a dirt stained face. I don’t attach to many things, but this tree seems to be an icon, a metaphor, a mirror for the stages of my own death and rebirth. When I was going through treatment for Melanoma, I would sit under the tree and I draw on her strength. I asked her to share her power with my weak body and scared spirit. I felt her gifts and I drank them in, a potent medicine for my soul and a whispering call to my cells to lean into the mystery of nature to restore and heal. When my cancer had finally left my body, her body became ill and she started to die. Did she take on my pain? As I watched her deteriorate, I watched parts of myself die. I deliberately engaged in processes that brought closure to the toxic parts of my ‘story’, conditioning, and identity that I had been holding onto with false promises of resuscitation or resurrection. In doing so I have stepped into a stronger personal power and more sustainable life. I embraced death, both literal and metaphorical.
This is a beautifully complicated and humbling acceptance that death is not only needed but a glorious liberation and a required practicing field for enhancing faith in the unknown and unseen. It is an opportunity to genuinely develop an unconditional trust in the majesty of Creation.
Her transition was a steady withdrawal and as she ascended I watched an era of my life dramatically shift as roles of partnership and parenthood transitioned, as many parts of my ‘old self’ dissolved in the same manner as her dried leaves. In the wake of her demise, new life and opportunity are regenerating all around. Her dead branches have been divided into piles of stumps and woodchips. The stumps prove to be perfect campfire seats for star-gazing teens and creatively repurposed plant stands and bird baths. The wood chips are used in flower beds, compost bins, meandering garden paths and even for graduate students developing sustainable community projects. Her body is spread back to my land, to the land of other eco-psychologically conscious people horning the cycles of transition, and in powerfully new ways providing the foundation for reciprocity and evolution. Through her death, I am learning how to thrive. Watching someone or something you love die (literally or symbolically) provides a raw, contemplative space to redefine the terms to which you wish to build your life.
When an environment or ecosystem undergoes significant change, by nature’s design, it learns to adapt and find ways of thriving, often times taking life towards optimal expression. The same applies to our psyche and soul.
- What parts of you can be released? Identify the cognitions or behaviors that are preventing optimal growth. Hold yourself accountable to solution focused methods of adaptation.
- How can your internal and external environment become more sustainable?
- Are you spending too much energy trying to control the things that are beyond change? Redirect your attention to growth orientation strategies. Let the things that need to die, die. Feed attention and energy to the rebirth.
- New context encourages the brain, the nervous system, the spirit to pay attention in new ways……trust this process. Death and growth are uncomfortable, but it is in the human design to adapt and evolve.
One last thought: Does anything really die or is it just recycled back into the flow of all life? (duh) The china berry as I once knew it no longer exists, yet she is all around, her presence strong in my being and her richest attributes reintegrated with more meaning and different purpose. The same applies to those parts of myself, they have a different meaning at this point in my evolution, they are little pieces of compost that support the roots for a bigger self.
For part one, visit here
Blessings, Namaste, Aho
Robin Afinowich
