On Burls

I was recently jogging through Brighton when I came across a tree frightfully pierced by an aluminum fence.  Now, for want of literary acumen, I will render a rather dry sketch of the subject of my reflections.  This stump is estimably two feet in diameter and stands just about three feet high. 

What’s moving about this stump is the evidence of its moving.  The stump which looks to have grown about the fence must not be so much older than the fence, which is rather telling of the age of the fence. In any case, this stump is studded with knots, vestiges of movement, of new growth.  

Now, I am not so philosophical, nor learned in dendrology, for this stump to have incited any interior reflections. My reflections have been sown by the grace of a dear carmelite friar, Fr. Paul, who spent the majority of one of our exchanges telling me about burls to teach me that trees never stop.  

On the one hand, the idea of a tree’s constant activity may appear self-evident, especially in our current season, as the leaves begin to yellow.  Yet, certainly these moments are overshadowed by others such as when you are hiking, skiing, or walking, and trees bear no indication of activity, settling easily into the backdrop of our own activities. 

Trees articulate change slowly in a manner that seems almost negligible, but trees articulate change in a manner that is constant.  When it rains, trees drink up the water from the soil.  It’s a wonder that Boston isn’t a swamp.  With sufficient sunlight, they transform photons into sugars to fuel the birth of brilliantly bright greens; and, as the air chills, they gracefully part with these same leaves and enter into a period of rest to prepare themselves for their regeneration in the spring.  When lightning strikes, or perhaps someone puts up an iron fence in too close a radius, they form burls around their wounds.  Perhaps it’s not a stretch to say our tall bark-skinned friends experience stress just as we do.  

Now, what was striking about the stump I jogged past was that it looked as though it was pitched right through by the fence. The visible topography of the trunk had seemingly appropriated the fence. Indeed it had grown around it.  It had persevered and its burls evidence its present perseverance. 

That trees form burls is demonstrative of their attention to their wounds and their resilience to grow beyond such bruising and imperfection.  They are not insensitive to external stressors as we might imagine them to be.  They are perhaps all the more vulnerable immobile-ly fixed to one locus by their roots. That said, what makes trees so remarkably rugged is not the product of stasis but activity.  

Now, we use idiomatic expressions such as “being cut down,” which I hardly think to be sourced from the history of vikings who might have actually engaged in such a behavior. My inkling is that we see ourselves in trees, most poignantly when they are ruthlessly cut down and repurposed.  This is, in point of fact, where Father Paul’s wisdom is paramount.  Trees never stop.  

Thus, were we to make a more holistic comparison between ourselves and trees, reason would reveal that whereas trees never stop, we often flit back and forth between stopping and going.  The parity between us and trees terms on account of our proclivity for stasis.  That is, trees are not passive recipients of external stressors, they are active participants in the ecosystem, which they inhabit, notwithstanding any of its inherent antagonisms, and they are so at every given moment of their lives.  On the contrary, we, nettled by the smallest of nettles, are often given to despair, to suspend our activities, to throw in the rag. 

Hence, I wonder if we can take inspiration from our fellow earth-dwellers, who actually suffer as victims of being cut down, to respond as they do.  I wonder if we can bear the stressors that are our own as bruises and burls and blemishes and persevere in growing around them.  Moreover, I reckon that, perhaps not immediately, we might find ourselves smitten by the beauty of burls, smitten by the beauty that is a testament to the will to persevere. 

I fancy such perseverance is rooted in what is truly fixed among all that is changing.  That is, I fancy such perseverance can only be firmly founded in the Everlasting.  Markedly such perseverance is bold and brassy and humbling.  It humbly renders to God all that we are “fickle freckled” and wounded in our inmost being  and prays for His unchanging mercy.  

I wonder if we can praise God for burls dendrological and figurative because they illuminate Who he is, who sanctifies us from within, who begets beauty among “all things counter, original spare,”  “Whose beauty is past-change” (Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J.).