Trees
Waiting to find out what lives.
The trees are back.
If you know the Hill Country, you know how lovely a Central Texas spring can be. But three years ago, we had nine straight days of hard freeze in Llano county and the whole state.
Historic, beautiful, and deadly.
Before I saw this picture of our land snapped by my husband that first shocking February morning, I had seen a Twitter post from a neighbor made just after sunrise. He was walking across his ranch, not speaking, camera pointed down at his boots. With every step the crystal grass shattered under his feet.
I’ll never forget that sound coming through my phone. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Well, he had said. I guess we’ll find out what lives.
A damaged plant will show new growth right alongside loss, but you’ll wait a long time to see how it’s going to shake out.
The first spring after the freeze, 2022, showed some recovery, but even the summer leaves couldn’t hide the wounded grey branches of the oaks. Last year, some trees I thought hopeless were sending out tentative new shoots. Things are coming back, we said. Might not be as bad as we feared.
But the spring of 2024! She’s Persephone, she’s a profligate, she’s a flower child with an expense account. She’s unleashed a bounty of bluebonnets, bluebells, paintbrush, coreopsis, verbena, winecups, and black-eyed Susans at the feet of the lush, bright trees. Sure, you can still see dead branches among the riot of new leaves, and giant stands of stony grey prickly pear are still visible beneath dozens of new pads. But those new pads are erupting in bright red flowers, and the tender green on each tree seems to caress any lifeless parts, which no one could remove or forget in any case.
The day before the eclipse, a giant swarm of honeybees flew past our porch in an astonishing, frightening tornado, settling in one of our trees for a night before moving on in search of a new home. My brother-in-law identified the new noise in our pond as a Northern cricket frog, and hummingbirds hoverboarded noisily past us at breakfast. By the time we pulled the rocking chairs off the porch and onto the grass for a better view of the big event, there seemed to be as many butterflies as bees vying for the sweetness of the flowers.
Life finds a way, said our formerly crunchy neighbor, as we sat down to watch the sun disappear (just for recreation, this time).
Back on campus today post-eclipse, I felt mildly wrecked. Had I been around pre-Galileo for such an event, I’m sure I would have fallen to my knees in the nearest wheat field and promised to repent if only God would return the sun to me. But yesterday, there had been no trace of any such angst as my visiting family donned their protective lenses. When the colors dimmed and the air went dark, we scanned the skies hungrily for the brief glimpse of the ring afforded us through spring clouds. We gasped at it, Paul and his brothers and nephew and I, and we marveled as the birds and insects grew silent. We gasped again when the light returned as suddenly as it had gone. Wow, we said. Gosh. We waited for better words to come, and when they didn’t, we returned to games and snacks, grateful in one another’s company.
Later, I opened my phone to a stream of joyous posts, astonishingly good ring shots accompanied by “Black Hole Sun,” pics of students in disposable glasses with their tongues out and their fingers raised in peace signs, post after post of friends in Cincinnati and Chicago and New York and Louisville and Rochester marveling at the heavens.
The Great North American Eclipse had drawn us all into the streets. All of us, enthusiastically, beautifully together.
So why did I feel so…what, exactly?
Alone?
Fortunately, I was looking forward to the last item on today’s agenda: a guest lecture by Anton Armstrong, the revered conductor of the St. Olaf Choir. If you read these pages, you know that I’m a Northfield girl who became a music freak largely because of my proximity to St. Olaf. Dr. Armstrong’s tenure there started years after I left my childhood home (you can imagine how I felt when he was introduced today as St. Olaf’s “longest tenured” choir director - zoinks), but his influence as a musician and mentor has been felt far and wide. I’d been looking forward to his talk for some time.
Titled “Music, Vocation, and Transformation,” the hour-long lecture was a lesson in loving, uncompromising conviction. Dr. Armstrong believes in the power of music to change the world, and he didn’t hesitate to talk about the changes he believes in. He spoke with pride about a woman mentor and a transgender student as a preamble to passionate words lauding diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. He spoke with humility and strength about legacy. He stopped multiple times to invite all the listeners to sing.
I expected the connection, clarity, and compassionate challenge of that hour.
I didn’t expect heartbreak.
“Together” is a loaded word.
I loved looking at all of my friends’ eclipse posts, but of course it wasn’t true that the sun and moon getting it on had brought the world together in shared understanding. That day, some people I know were waiting for the end of days. Their screens surely fed them as much fear as mine fed me fun.
Our human brains have ever only grudgingly done the work of investigating the world outside what we wish to know; today, we can curate our worlds more than ever. Then again, if the moon blocks out the sun, the sun is still there despite the perspective of a few dark, shaky moments. Today there’s more chance than ever before of something powerful and life-giving shining through our temporary fear.
We’re all still falling to our knees in the wheat field, in awe or in panic depending on the algorithm. I want to believe that we creatures would instinctively wish for the return of the sun. But that big ol’ life-giving ball of gas can mess us up - hence the protective lenses, the sunscreen, the giant water bottles, et cetera. Depending on how you feel about all that light, the moon getting her trajectory just right could be a serious relief.
“Legacy” is a loaded word too. (I may have written about it some already).
Anton Armstrong is part of a legacy, once a student of it and now its leader. Just the fourth choir director at his small Lutheran school, he has both continued and transformed the traditions and values handed down to him. I’m only adjacent to that legacy, an admirer of its music-making and teaching principals, and I am overly sentimental about it because it had such an influence on my young life. But today, being close to it again in that lecture hall felt heartbreaking. Because it isn’t mine. And because my own musical legacies are fairly broken.
It’s humbling to be part of a legacy or lineage, or maybe what I mean to say is that a legacy can teach humility. Music is a discipline, not a gift handed out as a bonus prize for talent, and musicians help each other with their lifelong practice. Humility helps with this, helps us to set aside ego and impatience and grasping, and to take up attentiveness and patience in our mutual work. Such a legacy of musical practice handed down (better, across) from human to human can be a beautiful thing, one of the most beautiful things.
But a practice is alive, mutable by definition, changing along with cultures and times and technologies and individuals. And just as it’s rare for humans to do the work of overcoming their own confirmation biases, it’s rare for legacies to reach forward with the same energy they use gazing into the past. Look at anything around us called a practice - medicine, law, yoga, martial arts, music - and you’ll see how difficult it is for us to get this right.
Recently, I came upon a Facebook thread of colleagues remembering a former mentor and boss of ours. The nine years I spent working for him were some of the most important in my life, for many reasons. The people contributing to this conversation are people I admire, like, and miss very much. Some the collaborations we were all a part of were mountaintop experiences for me. I very much wanted to be part of sharing memories with them - yes, even memories including the musician at their center, whose career ended in inevitable disgrace.
But it wasn’t possible. The thread clearly disallowed anything other than positive words. Everything was about how great it had all been. Some added that they had never seen any of the behavior that led to the downfall. I could almost understand it, the desire to rejoice solely in what had been good, but it was painful to see this fortunate group publicly lauding a titan who hadn’t been destructive to them. There was no room in that space for - well, for a lot of things - but certainly not for shared grief.
How I had wanted to share mine. Then, I might have been able to also share in the celebration. They are intertwined, after all. One is not compensation or excuse for the other. Surely you feel this kind of grief somewhere in your life. Even if the story above is particular in some ways, the experience of being polarized out of a story that is full of warring, contradictory details, opposite things that exist impossibly together, must be familiar to us all. The story above is not the only such story in my life, nor the only such community wrenched apart.
The cure for cancer and the bad experiments, the beneficial movement and the cruel instructor, the landmark argument and the unjust sentence - practices contain these victories and failures at every step. Humility is the only way through, as we wait to see what will survive.
Humility and love, according to today’s lecture, spoken by a man who must have stood in circumstances that challenged their use.
When I started messing around with doing my family tree on Ancestry, I found out a weird fact about my husband’s grandmother, who had always claimed to be Irish. As it turned out, her surname, which began with an O, was Alsatian. A birth certificate and a ship manifest, discovered with a few mouse clicks, instantly transformed her from O’Bringer to O-breh-jhay, a proud immigrant lineage rendered instantly even more foreign. I thought it was strange and wonderful and the beginning of a cool mystery, even more questions to answer, but it unfortunately upset my mother-in-law and her sister terribly. They moved quickly from surprise to disbelief to certainty, turning firmly away from the evidence. A few old documents online were meaningless, stacked against the shamrock embroideries of their childhood.
That’s how strong the pull can be of what we already want to believe. Esther Obringer being French hurt her daughters in no measurable, material way - but their mother was the Irish Esther, and so Irish she would stay. They decided who she was to them and what that meant, no light escaping on any side.
Imagine how much harder it is, then, to swap one world view for another that does materially hurt you.
I mean, I think we all know how hard it is. Which is why we don’t do it, usually.
Which is why it’s so heartbreaking, so inspiring, so humbling to hear a call clear and fearless, insisting that we use the power of music to listen and heal and bring the entire contentious world into one loving embrace.
Together.
Maybe that is our legacy, Lutheran diploma or no.
Three years after the big freeze, four years after the shutdown, we keep finding out what lives.
After darkness, light. Okay, wheat field. Let’s do this.
Thanks for this one to some of my tree branches - Bethel Lutheran Church, the Metropolitan Opera, and Baylor University.
Also, here’s a song about the big ol’ ball of gas:
Insightful and inspiring. Thank you!
Your writing shimmers with meaning - and brings insight and “aha” moments one after another, Kathy! Thank you so much.