Instagram reminds me that on this day in 2015 I took a picture of the hot-pink flower bed in a little recess like a belly button nestled in the granite rise of Arabia Mountain, just outside Atlanta, where I lived then.
This time of year there is the short-lived season of the diamorpha, a tiny, delicate plant that grows tenuously but tenaciously in precarious places like the crevices in these expanses of rock where rainwater pools temporarily. They make little carpets of furious color and then they are gone, holding their seeds aloft, mere inches from scorching-hot rock surface for the rest of the southern summer, most at risk from errant amblers tromping through their beds unknowingly.
The hot pink navel of the world is the omphalos, the center of the world, but it’s not - to me - a place, as the Greeks conceived it. They believed it was at Delphi, where the famous oracle prophesied. They marked the spot with a large, carved stone. Omphalos: “the center of a thing as both its essence and its eye,” as Susan Brind Morrow says. Instead, I feel that the hot pink navel of the world is actually a time of year, and that time is right now. A time of sex and death and rebirth and compost and patience and chaos and renewal, wildly entangled contradictions. Relentless gusting wind and hidden nests of baby rabbits.
It is a time of year that strains against the bounds of one season, one moment in time, it spills into every year before and every year to come. How can any one time hold the magnolia buds bursting into bloom and the reports coming out of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, for example? How can anything hold all of it? I cut my hair short and dream of meeting the sidhe on the back road to the house where I grew up, eating dirt from the ground in order to stay in the human world, in order to stay in my human body.
On Easter this year I finally pruned my fruit trees. It felt cruel because they are just starting to blossom - their flowers still curled into buds that are just about to burst forth - all the promise of beauty and fruit raining down onto the foot of my ladder as I chopped off dozens of young branches, carefully making my cuts at precisely the right place. But I kept thinking of something Wendell Berry said - The gardener carries no greater love for the rose bush than when the knife is in hand.
After every cut or three I stand back and assess the tree’s branching shape anew, staring appraisingly with full attention, lost in the shapes and patterns like a sculptor. The more branches I cut the more I see that must be cut - I see how that branch will grow into the center, or that one will cross another in time, the logic of excision unfolds the further into it I go. Masanobu Fukuoka famously attempted the first version of his “do-nothing” farming technique by literally doing nothing to the citrus orchard in Japan he was charged with tending, letting is grow wild and untended, which ultimately wiped out hundreds of the fruit trees to insect infestation and disease. It taught him a valuable lesson about learning to recognize the natural pattern and encouraging it. In this spirit I chop.
It’s a little late to be pruning - ideally this is done a bit earlier in the spring after the hard freezes are done but before the tree starts to bud - but I have read that it can even be done through summer as long as proper care is taken to keep your tools sanitized (in the hot, humid air spreads tree diseases more easily). So: onward, we do the thing imperfectly instead of not at all!
The annual pruning is especially important for young fruit trees in the first few years of their lives because it establishes an architecture to their form that keeps the tree healthy (and therefore able to produce more fruit). You want the branches to form an open, vase-like shape from a single trunk without any branches crossing over each other, or any shoots that sprout from the main trunk. Air circulation within the branches is one of the goals. Ease of picking the future fruit is something you want to think about too - encouraging young branches that grow outward where you can easily reach them is another factor. Fruit only grows on new growth, so some of the older branches will need to be pruned out over time to keep the tree productive.
I wonder what to do with the pruned flowering branches and think that perhaps an offering to the trees themselves is in order. I arrange the wands into circles at the base of the trees, crowns on the ground, life force that will return to the earth, back into the roots. I thank the trees, I send them my wishes for their health and longevity when I am not tending them any longer. It felt right, it felt bittersweet like everything has been feeling lately. It’s a small offering but it’s something. We do the thing imperfectly instead of not at all.
Later I found a reverberation of my impulse during Sister Spinster’s Sap Rising class (which I am loving) when Liz described an old Polish folk custom of “curling the birches”: people went out into the woods and tied some of the young shoots of the birch trees into circles and left them on the ground to help the trees grow, a ritual of thanks, relationship, and sometimes divination.
On Easter this year I reflect on the way that I’ve returned with curiosity and attention (and, if I dare say it, after being quite humbled) to the story of the resurrection of Jesus by way of some of the older stories of resurrection and rebirth: Osiris, Adonis, Attis. They are the echo whispered down a corridor so long we can’t imagine the end of it, maybe the oldest story humans tell, every year, again and again.
“Is it possible that what is conventionally thought of as religion is not a record of historical events but is based on poetic formulations of the actual world?” Susan Brind Morrow asks in her book on the Pyramid Texts of Old Kingdom Egypt, The Dawning Moon of the Mind. I want my conception of what is divine in the world to expand to include this, the literal and the metaphorical. The historical instance and the symbols that surround it, that prefigure it. After the destruction of the flood: new growth, new fertility. After the death-freeze of winter: the plum blossoms. Endlessly renewing itself. It is not hope, it is fact. And that’s something I hold onto as I cut the branches again and again.
Thanks for being here. See ya next time.