Grief and Growth Among the Trees
A tale of two books
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” - Henry David Thoreau
My latest book of poetry, The Tree Remains, finally released this week after several months of self-publishing work on my part. The thing is, this isn’t my first rodeo, as I’ve self-published quite a few books at this point. I have my process and my system and it works pretty well. But for some reason, this time around I kept running into hiccups, or I’d make an editing or typeset decision I thought was fine, but it didn’t work. It felt like I had to get this publication just exactly right, and if that meant delay, so be it.
In some ways, that’s been the whole story of this manuscript, which I started writing about 7 years ago.
When I was younger, I wrote so much poetry. It just sort of poured out of me. I also had a naive “first draft, best draft mentality”. To say it plainly, I put out a lot of crappy poetry. As I’ve grown older and hopefully wiser and more mature, both as a person and a writer, I’ve learned to let my work take the time it needs to develop and grow.
These poems needed a lot of time, because they are about death and grief.
I’ve shared bits of my story in other posts here and there, but in early 2017, I think the shock of Donald Trump’s election, and all that unearthed within American evangelicalism, also shocked and unearthed all sort of things in my own life and faith, which led a nervous breakdown that took me out physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for 6 months. With time, help, love, therapy, and antidepressants, I was able to crawl out of that hole. But in some ways the work was only beginning. Once I had my metaphorical feet back on some solid ground, I was confronted with the start of a long process of deconstruction/faith unraveling/disentangling/call it what you want.
If you’ve been through any major faith shift, you know it’s not just a rational matter of sorting out intellectual beliefs. It’s like being handed a messy, sticky ball of beliefs, memories, feelings, and identity, and being told to tease it apart.
Like I said, death and grief.
In my processing, I turned to the two things that have always helped me in hard times: nature and poetry. I walked and walked and walked out my feelings and thoughts, sometimes in raging anger, sometimes in tears. I sat and listened to the wind in the leaves. I watched tree trunks crumble into earth. I stood in patches of sunshine and remembered life could still be good. I watched nature die and come back, over and over again. I wrote, slowly, steadily, over years. And I came to realize the truth of Mary Oliver’s words:
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this too, was a gift.
My box of darkness isn’t something I would choose to give to anyone else, but it was a gift because it taught me so many things I would have never learned otherwise.
As I’ve been preparing The Tree Remains these past months, I’ve had the privilege of reading my friend Lore Wilbert’s forthcoming book The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor (which you should go now and pre-order. Yes, go now, I’ll wait). Lore mentioned in a recent Substack post that for her, the subtitle was always “Field Notes on Grief From the Forest Floor”
C.S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves: “Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."
I would add to Lewis that friendship can also rise out of the common experience of suffering and grief. “What? You’re hurting too? I thought I was the only one.”
That’s how I felt reading Lore’s book these past few months. In ways that I could never express so well in prose, and I try to attempt to articulate in my poems, she beautifully writes of her own faith shocks and shifts and deaths these past few years, and how she went to her own woods in upstate New York to walk and process and look at dead trees and watch new things emerge. Most of all she explores what it means to be “here” amidst everything that is changing within us and around us. She writes,
“I am trying to find my way home on this earth again. I am trying to change by degrees and make space for those who walk beside me to change by degrees too. I am interested in liberation into wholeness. Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, ‘The coming of the Kingdom is creation coming to be what it was meant to be.’ This is the home I’m after. An unshakeable kingdom full of malleable creatures in a morphing and growing and expanding creation becoming liberated. I am trying to find a new way of being and belonging and becoming in this world while still valuing the places and people I have left behind. I want to thank them for what they have given me and grieve for what they have broken in me and find healing and resilience among them but not of them.”
I’m going to be honest, reading Lore’s book has also helped heal things in me these past months, because healing can’t be done alone. My solitary poems aren’t enough. We also need to behold each others’ wounds and help stitch them up for each other.
If you’re a person of faith who has been walking through grief these past few years, I hope, if you decide to read my poems, that you’ll have a little “You too?” moment that brings a drop of healing. I hope you’ll buy Lore’s book and journey with her through the Adirondacks. But most of all, I hope that you know you’re not alone, and that new, beautiful things can sprout from grief and death, in time.
Thank you chris!
Yes. All of this.