An Ode to the Oak
How many creatures do you feed? Who comes in the night to feast upon your fruit? Who digs beneath your roots? Roosts or scurries within the cover of your green? How many creatures depend on your existence, Oak?
She dropped her acorns after the first frost, a glut of calories stored from summer sun, minerals and medicine she pulled from the earth and packed into kernels of nourishment, each with the germ of an oak and carrying the memory of an ancient land of forest and fern. So many sent bold new shoots searching for the cool, moist nourishment of earth, and so many were eaten or cached by creatures feasting and fattening for the hungry months coming. Yet more were scattered by jays on the heath where the brave ones will sprout and unfurl under the cover of the heather, to huddle and wait until the warmth of spring will draw them up into the light.
Still she holds her leaves, their colour now deepened from the verdure of summer to a waxy, olive green, flashing silver in the pre-storm breeze and crinkling from the edges in bright, rich hues of yellow and brown—a shining, golden aura to her olive green crown. Still absorbing every last photon of the low November sun before she yields to the season, gives in soft release back to the soil she grows from.
Who hides in the litter of your years, Oak? Who feeds from the riches of your compost?
She is anchored to the steep bank of the outcrop above the creek, gripping rock, holding soil on the slope against erosion with the matrix of her roots—the same soil that feeds her, that she feeds, year upon year with the compost of her leaves.
She braces softly as the chill picks up and swirls and rustles through her. Her crown sways, her branches dance with the wind. She has danced through many storms.
How many storms? How many creatures do you shelter when the wind howls and the rain tears in wild Atlantic torrents across this ridge of shale? Will you shelter me?
And she dances now, bold and strong, drumming rhythms of the earth reverberating through every leaf quivering in the thickening breeze.
May I borrow your strength, Oak? Will you show me how to dance with the storm?
I gather armfuls of the ivy that drapes from her boughs, food medicine to offer my goats. To reach it I must climb into her, pull myself up into the crook of her body and fold into the arms of the tree.
She is small, much smaller than the giants that still outline where an overgrown and crumbling, long forgotten, old stone road once ran beside the creek. Perhaps she is a daughter of one of those giants, I like to think, dropped between the rocks by a jay of many generations past. Slowed by the exposure and hunger of her steep, stony substrate and dwarfed by the rocks she anchors in, her thick trunk is split in two from the base—a scar that tells a story. Small, yet scarred and gnarled with the passage of her blossoming age. I wonder what is the story of her split trunk. Munched as a sapling by an adventurous, rock clambering herbivore, perhaps? Or broken in her first storm? Perhaps she just grew that way as she wound her way between the rocks to reach and spread and greet her first rain.
How long ago? What shape did the land form when you tumbled to the soil and anchored here? How many seasons have you seen?
But yet she grows strong and true. She holds me unshifting, solid and steady as I find foothold and stretch to reach the ivy, only her outer branches swaying in the breeze. I press my palms against her rough, weathered skin and feel her warmth seep into my cold hands, her strength, her life force, her medicine pulsing through her body from the dark earth and into mine.
May I borrow your strength, Oak? Will you whisper wisdom through your veins and into mine? Root me to the earth, tell me truths no matter how bitter for in truth I will find strength. In truth I will find strength.
I pull armfuls of ivy, peel its creeping, sticky tendrils from the crevices in her bark and she breathes. The ivy is heavy with its own swelling fruit, offered in a symbiotic dance of reciprocation to the jays that spread the acorns and the blackbirds, robins, thrushes and wood pigeons that visit the oak and pick the bugs from her roots and creviced bark.
Show me how to dance!
Beneath the oak is a platform of rock that juts horizontally from the earth before the ground gives way sharply down into the wooded creek below, thick and wide enough to build a small house upon. It was suggested to me by someone who knows about rock and foundations, that I might take out the oak and dig the dark, rich soil of her composted years back from her slope to build my house on this platform of rock.
Take out the oak. A dismissive flick of the wrist, as casual as that.
It would be a fine location for a cabin house: secluded, peaceful, overlooking the wooded creek where the only sounds are birdsong and the tinkling of the stream, and the rustling of leaves. The rustling of olive green, silver flashing, yellow crinkled leaves.
Take out the oak. My pulse quickens. Take out the oak. My body tenses. Take out the oak. My fingers tingle, my chest and jaw tighten, constriction rises to my throat. No. No house will be built here. This old oak and her creatures already have a home here.
I look up through the canopy, arms full of ivy, breathing wood-earth-bitter scents of tree and moss, from my saxifrage cushioned seat on a rock beside the oak, the place I come to remember myself, to ground in the spirit and strength of the oak. I count the acorns still swelling in their cups, racing to ripen before their mother releases them to the earth. I trace the bright green mosses that clothe the folds of her limbs, watch a woodlouse climb the ridges and valleys of her skin. She is wise, this old oak, and she stands in her truth—teach me to be true!—strong and enduring, steady and stoic as the storm builds and the wind whips around her precarious perch, and she steadies me.
I wonder how many more storms she will dance through, how many more seasons she will see, how many more sunbeams she will catch and feed to the soil, how many more acorns she will birth and give to the earth and its creatures. How many more lifetimes she will stand here, long after mine is done, pulling wisdom from the earth and giving her medicine, holding the soil in the matrix of her roots.
Thank you for reading. I’m adding fortnightly-ish Saturday stories for paying subscribers. They will be free until January and then will move behind the paywall.