Seizing the unseizable: Tanglewood

“When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.”

- Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Vasilis Avramidis, "Caretakers," 2012
140x100cm, oil on canvas

When you were a kid, did you ever dream of running away to live in the forest? To get lost? To go wild? To grow up? Would you be one of the beasts, bold and ferocious? Or another kind of creature, small and nestled spindly-legged in a bed of petals and thorns? Would you nest among hidden branches, migratory and ready to fly, collecting treasures only to leave them behind? Or would you plant yourself firmly in the dead leaves, sprout roots, nurture fungi in your shadows, and drink from what was hidden, always going deeper?

According to J. Crews in "Forest and tree symbolism in folklore," many cultures believe that trees function as "receptacles for spirits or souls." No wonder the forest can bring such company, offering fodder for so many childhood imaginings.

Yet the nature of the forest--and of the tree--is double-edged. The forest can be blinding, dense and frightening, endless and beguiling. The tree, though rooted, stands alone, often condemned to never touch another of its kind. Do we really wish to grow these kinds of roots? How do we know exactly where to cast our lot? At what point does the magic engulf us?

A lovely and painful song about what it means to decide to grow (roots) through love is "Tanglewood tree," by Dave Carter.

Tanglewood tree

Source

Love is a tanglewood tree in a bower of green
In a forest at dawn
Fair while the mockingbird sings, but she soon lifts her wings
And the music is gone
Young lovers in the tall grass with their hearts open wide
When the red summer poppies bloom
But love is a trackless domain and the rumor of rain
In the late afternoon

Love is an old root that creeps through the meadows of sleep
When the long shadows cast
Thin as a vagrant young vine, it encircles and twines
And it holds the heart fast
Catches dreamers in the wildwood with the stars in their eyes
And the moon in their tousled hair
But love is a light in the sky, and an unspoken lie
And a half-whispered prayer

I'm walkin' down a bone-dry river but the cool mirage runs true
I'm bankin' on the fables of the far, far better things we do
I'm livin' for the day of reck'nin countin' down the hours
I yearn away, I burn away, I turn away the fairest flower of love, 'cause darlin'

Love is a garden of thorns
Love's garden of thorns, how it grows
And a crow in the corn
Black crow in the corn hummin' low

And the brake growing wild
Brake nettle so pretty and wild
And thistles surround the edge of the
Cold when the summer is spent
Dim dark hour as the sun moves away
In the jade heart's lament
Lamenting a lost summer day
For the faith of a child
Who nurtures the faith of a child
When nothing remains to cover her eyes?
My body has a number and my face has a name
My body has a number, maybe my face has a name
And each day looks the same to me
Each hour like each hour before
But love is a voice on the wind
This longing is a voice on the wind
And the wages of sin
She cultivates the wages of sin
And a tanglewood tree
In a tanglewood tree

Yet the tree is not only of this earth. It is also of the sky: "The medieval Cabbalists represented creation as a tree with its roots in the reality of spirit (the sky) and its branches upon the earth (material reality)" (Crews, 43). So we are not condemned to suffocation. There must be other ways to grow.

Blue Christmas tree

The twisting of roots is only one kind of entanglement. Perhaps as humans, we must follow not the roots under the earth, but the entanglement of all that surrounds us, the entanglement of the stars:

"Quantum entanglement is one of the central principles of quantum physics, though it is also highly misunderstood. In short, quantum entanglement means that multiple particles are linked together in a way such that the measurement of one particle's quantum state determines the possible quantum states of the other particles" (read more here).

Apparently, this works across time as well as space. We are deeply entwined, yet this is not an overgrowth, or a distortion of something that was once comforting and beautiful. It is our very nature, and it is how we survive.

So if we look skyward instead, and grow our roots toward the heavens, will we find ourselves less tangled? Will the space that is not nothingness, because it is different from black holes, fill us with the room to breathe? Will the divinity of the stars anchor us as we stretch to understand how we connect? I cannot imagine we would be so different from the rest of the universe that we could not trust this. Whether we call it faith, spirituality, love, or just following our nature, it is in this expansive tangle that we root in each other, the earth, and the stars, all enmeshed in that which we cannot see.