The Bone and the Beginning
Our gaze has become so narrow - we no longer feel 10,000 trembling things at the periphery of our gaze.
- Martin Shaw, Trailing the Gods Back Home
A door enters the side of a huge tree not a redwood but an ancient tree, a European tree I don’t know. I push aside the vines, turn the handle and step inside. The room is clean and round. Light shines through a small window in the back. A wooden spiral staircase circles up one side of the room, a long narrow ledge for a desk curves around the other. I start climbing the staircase, relieved to be going up. No dampness of the caves or the passageways beneath the ground, journeys with which I’m more familiar. The railing spirals up and up all one curving piece of wood. The steps are smooth too, not roughhewn like the door. I reach a platform with a window that opens onto a narrow platform. I climb through the window and as I sit cross-legged on the platform, I realize I’m not alone, though I’m not sure who I’m with. I hear bird song and the sound of the wind.
“It’s quite a view,” I say, seeing as I say it all the work of humans, the good work, the joyful work, and the ugly exploitative work, all of it - spread out like a panorama beneath me.
“Yes,” says whomever is sitting beside me. “It is joyful and it’s heartbreaking - both.”
I came here, on this journey because I’m stuck, not sure how to find my way in. I ask if he’ll show me the way. I’m not sure how I know it is a him but I do.
“Why should I show you?” he asks abruptly. “Why should I trust you won’t take what you see and turn it into something else?”
I’m surprised by his directness, but I also know what he says is true. Why should he trust me?
I sit wondering how to respond. We listen to the birds and the sound of water moving, a stream, perhaps, in the forest. There is nothing I can say, so I look inside, passing over stones, rocks, markers of memories and moments that matter only to me.
I stop at my bone, a piece of my vertebrae, near to my tail. I’m surprised by how clearly I know it has to be my bone, not just any bone but this particular bone.
I take it out and hand it to him.
“A bone?” he asks.
“This – who I am – is in this bone,” I say. “Take it. And see for yourself.”
He takes it. And again we sit, listening to bird song and wind song. I wait while this spirit of the tree, I can’t think of what else to call him, weighs the worth of my life, deciding whether I am worthy of his trust. I’m not worried. It’s odd. I worry about everything. But I trust my bone. I don’t for a second doubt the truth of my love or that I’m doing this for the right reasons. Whether I can do it or not I doubt deeply. But why I want to do it, I don’t doubt for a second.
After some time, a short time or a long time, I don’t know, he hands it back to me.
“You can put this back,” he says. “And come with me.”