To Suffer with Joy

Trees

She had always loved the sycamore tree. Perhaps it was the tall stateliness of its trunk. Or maybe it was the way in which it dropped its ripened berries to stain the ground with blue-black juices. It is most likely however that she admired the beautiful combination of strength and delicacy embodied in this ageless and imposing tree. There is something bewitching in the knowledge that a sycamore’s weathered roots reach down to a layer of earth untouched by humankind, while its branches reach, without inhibition, toward the heavens. Its trunk is enveloped in a blanched skin that peels away in its fragility, revealing a soft brown under layer. The sycamore’s branches spread wide to embrace the sky, yet simultaneously she can lose herself in the interwoven ivory branches swathed in wide cool leaves.

“Get in here girl, and stop your daydreaming! There’s work to be done. This’ll be the first company we’ve had since ‘afore you were born. I can hardly remember what it’s like to have company.”

This last part the girl probably couldn’t hear, seeing as how she was running across the field of yellow that separated the dream world from the real world. Scarcely ten or eleven, her orange-blushed hair very much unkempt, she was full of spirit and life. Her mama was at the door again, wiping her hands on the soiled looking apron that was always tied around her waist.

Many could see that the mother, still a young woman, had bestowed a quiet beauty upon her only child. Weariness lined her weathered face. It made her appear much older than her years, but told of how she had suffered in a way that many beyond her years could never endure. Though she often gave outsiders the impression of having a rather severe character, everyone else simply knew that she had led a difficult life, and so no one ever thought twice about her seeming animosity towards the world. She had lost her husband to war a good many years back, and so her little girl had never known a father. Over the years she had resigned herself to her situation. After all, her daughter needed a mother. Like her face, her hands told a story of hardship. These hard-worked hands were so dry and cracked that she winced as she wiped them on the apron. She didn’t mind. The scars on her hands were witness to the life she led; for her daughter, for her husband.

Despite being an only child and a charming girl, the child had grown up very much unspoiled. This was due to the fact that she and her mother had to take on all the men’s work in the little household as well as those duties that a woman fulfills to keep her home.

“Mama, why’re you so worried? I’ve done all you’ve asked, and everything ‘septing the finishing touches on the meal’s all ready.”

“Look at yourself child. Sure, the meal can be nice and the home can be spotless, but my only masterpiece cannot go around looking like a chicken fresh-scared out of a henhouse.”

Friend

The table was happily filled that evening; one set of grandparents, one set of parents, one or two almost-grownups, a little boy, a little girl, and her very own mother.

She’d grown up entirely alone when not helping her mother, and so her imagination grew to paint pictures and scenarios more vividly or quickly than any master artist could do with his medium, whether it was literary or visual. Yet, she could not, for the life of her, make conversation at the dinner table. The boy she had been paired with for dinner wasn’t much better. They passed the time in silence while they ate and watched the grownups.

“Go take your new friend outside, my dear.”

My friend? She thought. Her eyes took in this little boy across the table. The concept was a little strange. Sure, she’d had friends all her life: the animals, the plants, even the trees. She innately knew what friends were. She knew that the beautiful elements of nature were all she had, but they were missing something.

“Yes Mama.”

He’s not my friend. She glanced at him again from across the table. Without a word she folded her napkin over her plate and moved her plate to the washing counter. She felt the boy follow suit, rather than see him, as she did this. She crossed to the sturdy wooden door, pushed up the heavy bar that latched the door, and stood waiting for him on the porch.

He stole silently up beside her. The soft thud of wood against wood as the door closed was the only hint of his presence.

“Do you wanna come?”

He looked at her and shrugged. She had the impulse to take his hand. She didn’t.

The grass was parched from the abuse it had received from the summer heat. But the ground told a different story, that of the changing seasons. The children could feel the cool earth beneath their feet. She was running. She hardly knew why. She wasn’t running from him. She instinctively felt that he would join her in the race across the field. She was again crossing into the world of imagination. This time, however, there was someone called friend.

Rock

They were sitting beneath a tree, her tree. She could feel the bark against her back, though indistinctly, for it was through her clothes. It was smooth and rough all at once. She imagined it was like her father’s hands: workers hands, but a gentleman’s all the same.

“So, you gotta name?” Nod.

“Do you?”

“M’name’s Peter.”

“Rock.”

“What?”

“Your name means rock.” She felt all of a sudden he could be her friend. After all, he was no different than those things that had kept her company throughout her life.

“Oh.” Silence. “You never told me your name.”

“Máire.” She knew what it meant. He didn’t say anything.

The sky turned from blue to orange to grey. The crickets started their song as the cicadas stopped their thrumming. Soon everything was wrapped in a velveted blue and splashed with white and nickel. Their conversation was dappled by the light of the evening as it filtered through the trees. They had talked about the why of things. They talked about the way things are, and even of how they used to be. They listened to the nature filled silence.

She heard her mother calling again.

Growing

Racing again. Across fields; across days. They began sharing themselves. Her person began to know his. Any look, any phrase, and she could tell him what he was thinking. Months went by as they began to learn each other. He was soon able to know her feelings, though she still had trouble expressing herself to another. They often talked underneath the trees across the yellow field, always outside. Never once did they visit her silo. It was hers and hers alone.

From inside the silo she felt she could withdraw to inside herself. Inside she could explore her own thoughts, even if they were not distinct or tangible.

The field is stretching across her mind as far as any could see, but only one is seeing it. Her tree is standing tall. Its foliage is full and lush. The bark gleams white in the sun. The sycamore is growing.

Sitting inside the silo was something she used to do often, but once she found a friend she felt less of a need to reflect; to study the workings of her mind and imagination. She could think out loud with Peter. He would not judge her, but think with her. They would know each other better as he responded to her thoughts with his own over months-a year and more. She was learning. Learning what it was to trust in a friend, learning what it was to share with a friend. She was growing in charity; growing into a woman.

Silence

A week went by, then another, and still no word. This wasn’t the first time. He had only been occupied with his work, with his life, but she felt the long silence acutely. The long silence was unsettling. The long silence allowed thoughts of discontent to chill her through to her soul. Why can’t he make the effort?

She began to realize the danger. Her heart was trusted to the hands of another. Before a friend, there was never a chance that her heart could be mishandled. How could she have let herself become so dependent on another living creature? How could she have trusted so much of herself to one who is, by nature, prone to stumble? She found that she had come to care deeply for him. It was not time for her to love. He could not be the one she is to love. In the silence her mind and soul told her this. Yet, there, in the wells of her heart was the boy, the young man, Peter. One day their friendship would end. One day they would each find a person with whom they would spend their entire lives with. One day they would part ways. She cannot let this happen. The torture would be unbearable. She cannot sit by while he lives his life apart from her. She cannot bear the thought of losing her most treasured friend. It would have been better if they had never met. In the silence she dwelled on this. In the silence she began to gather herself and stow it away in the depths of her being. She cannot trust herself to someone who is not there.

A wind is blowing a grey, forbidding air through the recesses of her mind. The slowly fading leaves are rattling a chilling rhythm to the melody shaped by the wind whistling past the pale branches. The bark is soft, yet is not divulging the same warm blush of life that it once held. But it hardly seems to matter. No one is there to watch or listen. It may as well be silent.

Words

“Why’re you questioning me like this?”

“Because I relied on you, Peter. I relied upon your presence to comfort me. I trusted you would be there. Where were you?” Her voice was tinged with a soft sorrow. Not the slightest hint of reproach could be found in her tone as she pressed him for answers.

“It’s got nothing to do with you.” These were supposed to be comforting words. “Does it?”

That’s what you think. In her thoughts the pitch of anger and frustration had risen to a scream. He felt she was judging him, blaming him.

“Friendship works both ways.”

Does he not see that he cannot just leave me? Does he not know that my heart is tied to his? He was crushed to know that he had hurt her in such a way. He was terrified of the knowledge that he held the heart of another in his calloused hands. She fell apart.

“I’m sorry”

“I know”

They each understood the other. They understood that neither had intended to hurt the other. They understood that each needed the other. They were friends.

Touch

His hand touched her elbow. They stood outside. Her fingers brushed his arm in an act of forgiveness as her eyes begged him for pardon. His arms enfolded her as they found solace and forgiveness in each other. Maybe it would all be right.

Things began to fall back into an old comfortableness. He treated her a little more tenderly, and reassured their friendship with touch. There was a new openness. Oftentimes they would talk on the grass and his fingers would brush against hers. Their faces would sometimes rest together; their cheeks, their foreheads. Don’t think on it.

Touch began to replace their once beautiful and penetrating correspondence of thought. Comfort with one form next to the other began to stifle their ability to share thoughts. She began to feel how much she wanted the comforting touch, but became increasingly more frustrated as touch seemed to separate their thoughts. Maybe they were closer in the physical world than before, but what of the world in which they could truly relate; thought to thought as one mind to another? It was touched, and its bloom faded.

Reaching

“I can’t do this.”

He had reached at first with his thoughts, then his hands. Then, that was all he reached with. Slowly, the reaching on his part diminished altogether. She did not realize this right away. She had reached back. She had reached with all her being. The friendship had been carried on two sets of shoulders. She had continued reaching long after he had ceased to ask for her company. A constant strain upon her shoulders pressed upon her heart. She cannot uphold a friendship single-handedly. Unaided it would fall. But it hurt her, and she had to rest her soul, wearied from reaching.

“I can’t keep reaching.”

Why

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

“How am I supposed to tell you what’s wrong with yourself?”

He could hardly bear to tell her what she asked. He knew its crushing power. But he too had been suffered to bear devastating words. It had been so long since they had seen each other. The silence had been sustained too long. The silence still lingered in their minds.

“Don’t reach,” he whispered. “It’s not important. We had a friendship. I don’t know what this is anymore. The floor keeps cracking away every time you question, every time you say you can’t.”

Over long stretch of time there had been ties that knotted that hallowed place under her ribs to his. Those binds are there still, but they are strained and rapidly fraying. Why?

She is watching as the leaves are being torn from their branches by the howling gale. Everything is cold—frozen by this storm that is uprooting everything she knows and sees in her being. She is beholding a vast emptiness in her soul. Why?

Unraveling

It was a rather weathered silo, lashed together from a meager assortment of warped wooden slats and capped with sheets of soiled tin. Out of use for years, the old storage tower was slowly being reclaimed by nature. The dirt floor was sparsely strewn with bits of life that had learned to exist without light. She liked to sit there when it rained to listen to the drops crash down upon the tin roof from the high heavens. During the storms, shadows from lightning would play across her skin through the chinks in the boards, dappling her skin with eerie tones. She had sought seclusion more often than not, and had never before been inclined to have a friend to give her thoughts to. She had never used to have the desire to allow others to pour their thoughts into her hushed world. She would much rather take in the gestures of those around her and let her thoughts meander through what she had learned from studying them.

Solitude and loneliness had different smells to her. In times of contemplation this little silo held the rich scent of rain-soaked loam and wood, which solaced her. But this time there was no rain. This haunt now held nothing that could comfort her. Instead, a smothering quiet impregnated the air and pressed heavily into her very being. This place of comfort now suffocated her nose and lungs with parched clouds of something recalling rot. She tried to ignore the wretched state of her surroundings and dug her palms into wearied eyes

The string is no longer a lifeline and she is swallowed by the vast expanse of wasteland in her soul. The dry, cracked plates of earth stretch across the lonely wideness of her mind. They are drenched with tears and stained with the blood from where the binds cut into the flesh of her bleeding heart. Who was ever to believe that this wasteland, this barren valley, was ever a lush pasture in which the white sycamore was filled with strength and life? Now the pale wood hangs on broken arms, no longer to support its mighty branches.

Her friend was gone. She had once found joy in giving a few thoughts and receiving his in return. The thoughts they shared were neither profound nor momentous; he only liked to voice his own interpretation of the goings on of the people seen day to day. He relished finding the little quirks he had seen in life that held true to human nature. The simple desire of valuing the company of another creature had silently knit itself into her being, though she had so long succeeded in living apart from the outside world.

As her fingers raked their way through her hair she found the answer she had been desperately pursuing. How could the ties, which both held so dear, have been severed?

She had cut them.

Ashes

Her world began collapsing around her. She had pulled her thoughts and her love out from the depths of her being, in order to share them with Peter, for so long that she had forgotten how to retain them. Now, she looked within herself and perceived nothing; no love, no thought. She was barren.

All the strength she had left she devoted to her daily obligations to her home and mother. Never once did she see him. What else was there to do? If she stilled herself she was swallowed by the clouds of ash; all that remained of her as a human, all that remained of her feeling. If she stilled herself then the clouds of ash would rise and choke her. Her eyes would burn and water. Her body was racked with suffering. As she worked the emptiness and ash would begin to settle. How is the suffering, which enshrouded her, to be reconciled with life? She longed to be happy. She longed to find that joy that she once entered into from day to day.

There is a slow and constant weeping from the branches. The ashen fallows of her heart drown in the grief that is gathering in thick clouds above. The tears are mingling with the ashes. It is the beginning of a field of rich, life-giving soil. The bark is a deep burgundy, wet with sorrow; it pulses with a new life. The heart is beating again.

Love

Her heart sent out a silent prayer. Love. It was time to love. To love with the purest form. To love with charity. It is only in Love that one can find hope and joy. Yet, there is always pain that is bound to this Love. The answer was Love. Everything must be done out of Love. She looked to her mothers hands. Were they not raw and torn? Yet, all she did was for the love of her daughter. All the pain, all the suffering of her life was worthwhile.

There is a new seed. A thorn is in the heart of her sycamore. It is the seed of Love. It brings new life to her wearied being. The ash is now a rich soil and the pale branches reach anew to the heavens.

Joy

It was another day. The house was across the yellow field and the grass beneath the sycamore was gently yielding to her back as she lay flush with the cool ground. She closed her eyes to the warm sun, which painted the white branches above her a muted gold. She was content. Her life, now lived for Love, may not have been painless, but there was joy.