The Tree With the Lights In It

Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

While I was home at my parents’ house for Thanksgiving break, I found my old, marked-up copy of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and started re-reading it. In the context of late November’s short, dark days, cold winds, and commercial transformation, I couldn’t help seeing Annie’s concept of “the tree with the lights in it” in a holiday-tinged hue. Everywhere, neighbors and shops and city parks were literally bedecking trees of all shapes and sizes with LEDs and incandescents - sometimes even holding tree-lighting ceremonies. As always, my favorites were those with white lights so tightly-packed and meticulously strung that it was as if the bulbs were a natural part of their anatomy: trees made of needles and sap and tiny seeds of light.

It is clear from Pilgrim Annie’s view that the tree with the lights in it is more than just a tree, however. I know she would shudder at any attempt to directly decode her symbol, but I must know: is it the divine? Her own temperate-climate version of the burning bush? Is it instead the unifying force of nature, an energy normally obscured but in one heaven-rent moment made visible? Or is it just revelation alone - not God, nature, or humanity per se, but just a new sight, granted ephemerally to an open, hungry mind?

In some ways, of course, the tree with the lights in it is all of these things. Painted on the backdrop of the last few weeks, though, the tree has struck me most poignantly as an image of clarity. I’ve been resonating with this other passage of Annie’s from Pilgrim:

A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision. When you see fog move against a backdrop of deep pines, you don’t see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness floating across the air in dark shreds. So I see only tatters of clearness through a pervading obscurity.

I am in an all-too-familiar state of having more questions than answers. I feel like I am stumbling blindly through life, contracting a lot of bruises on the way, and crying out for help without much hope of a response. I have been dumped in a foreign land with no map, forced on stage with no script, handed a pile of lumber but no blueprints. I am frustrated.

It is Advent again - the time when for a few short weeks, the rest of the world starts to acknowledge the painful waiting I’ve been experiencing all year. The people of the church come together and groan expectantly, singing the minor-key carols that speak to us through the liminal fog, uttering words of hope to a tune of not-yet-here. We try to prepare the way for the tree with the lights in it. We tear at the blinders on our eyes and pray, palms open and desperate, to receive our daily bread of Truth. Our Answer awaits, if only he would go and get himself born!

I’m not sure what the lesson here should be. I wish I could tell you that I’d had a recent encounter with the Tree of Clarity - that like Annie, I’d been “lifted,” “struck,” “knocked breathless by a powerful glance.” Sorry, friend. No revelations here. I do believe in the tree with the lights in it, though. One of its distant cousins is sitting on the bookshelf in my living room, two feet tall, cut down in New Hampshire, hung with quirky ornaments, and crowned with a gold star cut from shiny wrapping paper. She serves as a reminder that Annie’s tree is out there - that hope does not disappoint.

In many ways, the good news, Emmanuel, will not come on December 25th. Sometimes a bit of clarity only serves to show us the full extent of the darkness we inhabit. When I escaped the city a few weeks ago and camped under the unobstructed sky of Big Sur state park in California, there were so many stars that I couldn’t recognize a single familiar constellation. It was a humbling, breathless beauty that I needed, that healed, that I hungrily swallowed from the spoon of the creator. But it was a question answered by a million other questions, and Christmas, I think, is similar. On that silent night, holy night, we sing because thanks to - or in spite of - our present reality, we believe in the tree with the lights in it. We pray for a glimpse, even for one stolen second, of the world lit up as it was meant to be.

Country Mouse, City Mouse

I grew up in the suburbs. We had just about one acre of property, which was large for our neighborhood. The extra space was for a swimming pool – my mother's condolence for moving to the Midwest and giving up hope of a career in marine biology. She really did bust out her snorkel, fins, and even scuba gear every now and then, though more for the sake of testing the equipment than finding any intriguing flora and fauna on the bottom of our pool. The pool served to divide the back yard into two yards, one of which was fenced in for the dog (later dogs) to run around, and another which was off-limits to the pets and nice for playing volleyball and badminton with guests because it was free of doggy land mines. The whole thing was surrounded by trees, so we had the illusion of being hidden from our neighbors even though they were really just a stone's throw away.

Our house was nothing special – four bedrooms for five people, a living room and dining room that were rarely used, a family room and kitchen where we spent most of our time, and a basement that I affectionately referred to as the “room of doom” due to its wall-to-wall clutter that made any excursion feel like it could be your last. We attended more-than-satisfactory public schools and had access to hundreds of activities from soccer, ballet, tennis and swimming to girl scouts, boy scouts, summer camp, and the culturally-questionable but undeniably fun “Indian Princesses”. We lived in the town with the most churches per capita of any city in America, and the worst crime I can remember happening to us was when the obnoxious neighbor kid managed to steal our stone age car phone (remember those??) by reaching through the rolled-down window. From almost every angle, the suburbs were an ideal place to grow up. But the moment I turned 18, I fled – and since then I have had no desire to go back.

I went to college in a small town in Vermont. On one side were the gently rolling and aptly named Green Mountains, and on the other were the shadowy peaks of the Adirondacks. In between were small and medium-sized farms, winding roads, and a cute New England town that didn't have every store you could ever need, but it did have one devoted to cow paintings and another that sold penny candy, plastic swords, snow shovels, and craft supplies. There were only a handful of churches, but I found one that was just right for me, and though I only went there for three years and have now been away for almost seven, I am still welcomed back as family and given a seat in my old pew whenever I stop in for a visit. You do not have to “escape to nature” when you live in Vermont; nature is the center of life. Occasionally that is a bad thing when it means hurricane rains have washed out the only road to your house or the fields that supply your livelihood, but most of the time it is humbling and awe-inspiring and life-giving. As the words engraved on the front of my college chapel declare, “The strength of the hills is His also.” And it is mine as well.

It would make sense if I left the suburbs and fell in love with the rural countryside and that was that. After all, I have also lived in a tiny farm cottage in western Belize and camped outside for six months along the Appalachian Trail. Everyone knows I am a Nature Bum, or you may even say a Dirty Hippie. But that is not the whole story. Actually, aside from my stint on the Appalachian Trail, I have spent all of the past six years living in major urban centers. Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston – I have developed a soft spot for cities, and should I have the opportunity to leave, I know there are a wide array of things I would miss.

My love for cities, unlike my love for the country, was something that was learned rather than innate. I was drawn to the city for the same reason most people are: the “o” word, opportunity. I was looking for opportunities to dance and be active in the world of dance, and there aren't many of those in rural Vermont. In the process, I ended up seeing and experiencing parts of America that neither the suburbs nor the small towns prepared me for. There was poverty. There was violence. There was racial tension. There was corruption. There was opportunity close at hand, yet many were still denied access to it. And amidst all this were the people – glorious bands of survivors whose capacity to love and celebrate and welcome the stranger in the midst of pain and struggle struck me to the core in a way that can never be unstruck. I will carry the wound, as my one pastor used to say, as long as there is healing left to happen. The hustle and grime and energy of the city – and I'm not talking about the theater district or the waterfront or the art museums here, but the “shady” parts where no one wants to live and no one comes to visit – had taken on a realness to me, an authenticity that the suburbs and the rolling hills seemed to gloss over and deny.

It's not really true of course, but that's how it felt to me. To quit the city would be to run away, escape, take the easy road. I would be far away from the daily reminders of injustice and poverty and racism. I would be too busy hiking and gardening and gallivanting about with people that looked and thought like me to remember the struggles of those who are different, those who do not have the choice to get out. Yet still, the pull is there. Who doesn't want to surround themselves with like-minded people who are easy to live with, in a place that energizes and speaks to their fundamental character? And why should I have to wait till retirement – forty years off in a hypothetical future – to live my ideal life?

Oh yes, I remember! There is one other reason I'm still here besides the soul wound of the city: jobs. I came to the city for dance and have massively neglected the majority of opportunities that are here on that front. But in the meantime, the economy crashed, and the already job-scarce small towns of New England have become entirely barren in terms of employment opportunities. Unless you know the right person, your resume is likely to be met with nothing beyond a sympathetic laugh, especially in the nonprofit sector, my field of choice. Let's say for one imaginary minute though that I did know the right person. A door opened, wide enough for me to glimpse the life that lay beyond and casting a long strip of tantalizing light across my current path. Would I take the bait? Would the city mouse cast off her subway-riding, diverse-dining, apartment-dwelling ways for those of the snow-shoveling, truck-driving, manure-scented country mouse? Would it be worth the sacrifice of being at the center, in the midst of the action, or will I always be a split personality, with one foot on the street and the other in the soil and no interest in what lies between?