I think it’s important to share with you a bit of my personal theology. (And a bit of my love for etymology at the same time.) The word “spirit” shares root with “breath(e)” which isn’t as obvious in English as it is in Spanish’s “respirar” or the cognate “respiration.” But we see it in word’s like “expire”–to breathe out, one final time, I suppose; to die. “Inspire”–to give life to an idea. “Aspire”–to put your life’s effort into something. “Conspire”–breathing (maybe, whispering?) together.
Life, spirit, breath.
I have a tendency to believe that everything with a spirit breathes. And everything that breathes has a spirit. I’d like to think that each of those breathing creatures is divine in its nature and that its breath is holy in its nature. What is holy breath? What is holy spirit? What is divine? My personal inclination tells me that everything is–man, animal, trees.
According to sixth grade science, I inhale oxygen and exhale carbon–bodily waste. My body. My bones. My cells. I exhale a part of me, and the trees inhale it. The trees breathe, inhaling carbon and exhaling oxygen, keeping the carbon for themselves. They are made of carbon, my bodily waste. They are made of me.
I tapped maple trees for the first time this week and spent the day babysitting the stove, boiling down sap to syrup at a 40:1 rate. The sap was harvested from trees on the land in Strickland. From trees that witnessed my birth and homecoming, whose roots have been in the earth longer than my feet have been upon it. My chubby fingers and toes curled around their trunks as I’d climb in my youth. They were there as I grew. Saw me waddling through February snow in just a diaper, chasing fireflies through tall grass in the heat of summer nights, and resting on the hill after a long days of transporting mushroom logs last summer. The maples stood witness as we hauled away the chicken coop and delivered rocks to the long driveway. Stood firm and tall as we planted trees and a garden. They wept when we laid Jasper to rest, and their roots lovingly welcomed his body back home in the dirt. They’ve listened to me giggle and weep from youth to womanhood.
The maples and I have grown alongside one another for over thirty years, exchanging the most intimate parts of our selves through breath. Cocreating life between the two of us. My carbon transmuting into bark, leaves, sap. Their oxygen delivering life to my cells through my lungs, heart, blood. These trees know me in the same way a mother knows her babe in a divine exchange of life and cells.
Did you know (and I’m no doctor, no scientist) that when a mother nourishes her child at her breast, her milk changes with her baby? Her milk becomes rich with antibodies and nutrients when the baby needs it. If the baby has an upset stomach, a cold, whatever it is; the milk adapts. A connection between mother and child, breast and mouth both holy and divine in its nature.
When I drilled and tapped these motherly maples, whose sap flowed generously like milk from mother, I couldn’t help but to believe that it flowed for me. That these trees, whose cells are my cells, had offered me the colostrum of their first tap. That their syrup couldn’t possibly taste as sweet or as perfect to anyone else as it did to me. The maples poured out their life and their spirit so that mine would be a little sweeter. Their branches, in my mind, reached down and lovingly stroked my head and tucked my hair behind my ears. Called me “Love” and “Darling” and “Child” with both adoration and pride. My mother earth, mother maple.
I am flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone.
Suckling at their breast as they look down with love.
Credit to Millicent & Elise for their insight & perspective