FLORENCE | NATURE | PHEROMONES
The Wounds of Wood
The Practice of time spent in solitude
pheromones falling -
heart wisdom woven within
the wounds of the wood
This morning, we walked up from Florence to Giardino del Boblino, the smaller, more public cousin of the nearby Boboli Gardens, just outside the walls and among the hills that overlook Florence. It’s a lovely garden, and we sit hidden in the mossy shade of huge pine trees. Birds are in full chorus, singing the glories of the day, and the sky is scattered with a few clouds on an otherwise sunny morning whose temperature is that perfect mix of cool and comfortable.
The Wounds of Wood
A centerpiece of the garden is L’Albero dei Cornuti (California Incense-cedar), a massive, strongly branched cedar that really draws the eye. It has lived a life, and the wounds and cuts of age are there to be seen.
Roxanne is watercolor-journaling this morning. Her entry includes this cedar, a branch of an alternating spike-needled pine that cuts across our view, and a mossy branch nearby. It’s nice to get out of the narrow streets of the city and into a place with a more open feel of nature.
One artful practice that can release more peace into the world is sitting in little parcels of nature like this one. To escape the task-oriented confines of the city, to go to a place of refreshment, to watch… to listen… to feel the breeze on your cheeks… and to receive the pheromones that drop from the canopy of the trees. This is a practice of solitude in nature, and it can be life-giving.
Becoming a Greener Thing…
In the book The Overstory, Richard Powers writes a snippet that captures the effect of tree chemicals on his character, Mimi:
She leans back again against the pine’s trunk. Some slight change in the atmosphere, the humidity, and her mind becomes a greener thing. At midnight, on this hillside, perched in the dark above this city with her pine standing in for a Bo, Mimi gets enlightened. The fear of suffering that is her birthright — the frantic need to steer — blows away on the wind, and something else wings down to replace it. Messages hum from out of the bark she leans against. Chemical semaphores home in over the air. Currents rise from the soil-gripping roots, relayed over great distances through fungal synapses linked up in a network the size of the planet.
The signals say: A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again. They say: The air is a mix we must keep making. They say: There’s as much belowground as above. They tell her: Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life. There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they’ll germinate. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.¹
There’s a lot of plant wisdom packed in that paragraph.
What wisdom are you gathering in nature? What lessons do the birds sing to you? What word, carried on the breezes, breathes its way into your heart space? What story do the knots, the swirls, and the wounds of the wood tell you?
¹ Powers, Richard (2018). The Overstory. W.W. Norton & Company, p 497.
From one of my favorite writers on Medium, Amanda Laughtland:
I like this article because it discusses picking up sea glass on the shore, one of our favorite contemplative activities. We found a treasure trove of all the Atlantic’s glass washed up on one beach in Ireland!
If this resonated, there are more:
The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.
Top writer in Art, Watercolor, Haiku, Sermons, Refresh the Soul Weekly, and Episcopal Church.
