self-pruning

for all my hype as an environmental crusader, I know very little about the natural world.  I live in a nature-lover's dream, surrounded by trees whose names I do not know, fungi with life cycles I'll probably never understand, insect sounds and bird calls I can't identify.  Need a walt whitman quote or a stanza from "how great thou art," I'm your girl, but don't come to me for latin names or an explanation of the krebs cycle.  luckily, for the sake of my children, really, I've surrounded myself with lots of smart friends.  my scientist friends:jamin and cora's only hope of making sense of their world outside of e.e. cummings.

while hiking in our neighborhood recently with one of these science-minded people (who happens to be a forester), I made the mistake of trying to act knowledgeable enough to ask an intelligent question.  "so these pine trees," I said (I was pretty sure I had that much right), "what sort of disease do they have?"  the lower limbs of all the trees we could see were obviously dead, brittle and brown and needle-less.  thankfully my forester friend is not only smart, but also patient and gentle with ignorant questions.

"it isn't disease that makes the limbs look like that.  those trees are all self-pruning.  all the trees here are the same age, even though they're all very different in size.  they were planted here probably forty or fifty years ago.  some of them grew faster and have shaded the others out, but they all self-prune so growth can be concentrated at the top, where the most sun is."

I think about that every time I walk through that grove now, how self-pruning can look like death and disease to the uninformed bystander.  how important it is to concentrate on growth where the most sun is.  how even though they all started out the same size for the most part, those trees all look so different that each other now.

I think I am self-pruning.  I have to remind myself that concentrating on growth where the most light is does not mean failure in what I have spent time growing before.  I have to remind myself that self-pruning doesn't always look pretty, especially to outsiders who might not know exactly what it is they're seeing.  and even if parts of my life are falling away, my trunk is healthy.  I'm just reaching for the light.