October 1, 2014 – The old oak tree

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A week ago this morning, at 1:30 am, a huge limb from our ancient coast live oak tree (they say it could be anywhere from 150-300 years old) fell on our house, kicking off a chain of events that nearly completely took over my psyche.

This tree is 8 feet in diameter, 6 feet from our front door – and about 45 feet tall and twice as wide. We live under it. It probably should not have had a house built so close to it, but that was done in 1954 before either of us were born.  Now it is ours to care for and steward.  It lost an even bigger limb in May – due to internal rot, which so politely landed without harming the fence or the neighbor’s roof where it rested itself.

This one did a bit of damage – not huge, but it landed literally 5 feet or so from the skylight in my studio, the one I was painting under a few hours earlier.   It bashed a hole in the eave and shook the house – and us!   The consulting arborist came at first light and, seeing the solid wood of this branch, declared the tree likely unsafe.  He suspected the wood is dry and brittle due to the drought.

This meant it was upon us to take down this enormous, beautiful piece of nature’s sculpture – that processes who knows how much CO2 into oxygen every day – and has been since likely before Abraham Lincoln was born.  I wept.  I talked to a “tree whisperer” – a lovely woman named Heather Preston, who I met when working for Light Rain, doing art reproduction. We worked on all the images for her beautiful book called “Tree Spirits.”  She consoled me and wisely suggested that I honor it by capturing it in photos, drawings, paintings – and then with ceremony, before we took it down.

It was a huge deal to have the responsibility of deciding this tree’s fate. It seemed so unconceivable, looking up into it, still seemingly so very alive.  The next morning, I called the arborist to ask if we could press the pause button on the permit process to “remove” it.  He was at the time in conference with his colleagues on how we could mitigate the risk so we could safely live under it.  None of us had the stomach to take it down.  The birds, the squirrels, the shade-loving plants beneath it, it’s a whole eco-system. So we’ve decided to prune it rather aggressively and then cable the limbs together. I’m so relieved – and still leery of being under it.  I’m painting at the kitchen counter until it’s tended to!

We noticed that this year it has had an unusually abundant crop of acorns, and asked the arborist if the tree “knows” it’s in decline and is working extra hard to ensure its reproduction. This had me noticing the other coast live oaks in the area on my morning hike with Bo.  I saw that many of the trees had no acorns at all and none had anywhere near the amount on our tree.  This triggered my compulsion to head to Google. (I used to be a search geek for a living!)  I searched for “oak tree age acorn production” and I learned that oak trees don’t actually start producing acorns until they are sometimes as old as 25 years! Wow!  Twenty five years before they develop the resources to reproduce themselves.  Talk about patience!

Now, in its old-age, this tree is cranking out the seeds for potential new oaks like crazy.  This so speaks to me in my own process to grow myself as an artist and teacher/leader/guide.  Our insta-famous crazed world, where going-viral is revered, though super-compelling, is unsettling to me.  It’s obvious to me now why – it’s against nature.  Things that matter the most come in their own time; they require of us faithful hard work, and a season-after-season maturation process in order to bear fruit in abundance.