Healing in the Aura of the Ancient Seed
Of all the trees in my neighborhood, the Dawn Redwood mesmerizes me the most. I admire it as if it were a charcoal drawing, textured in shades of reds, greens and browns, the muscular-looking grooves of its trunk chalked heavily in deep browns and black.
Allured by its unique appearance, I approach. The leaves, bipinnate—or should I say, branchlets—are softer, more pliant than any other tree I have encountered. And the faintly shredded, almost shaggy surface of the bark evokes a time-tested soul, scarred yet still vulnerable.
The first time I saw one, something mysterious about it beckoned. Although I couldn't detect any scent, I wondered if the tree was emanating some ancient odor, triggering a sense of nostalgia. After all, the tree's lignin and cellulose, the same materials that break down in old photographs, emit a scent reminiscent of vanilla-almond that we associate with lost time.
The dawn redwood is a "living fossil." Since the time of dinosaurs, dawn redwoods have graced riverbanks while honoring the strength of the sun. Thought to be extinct, they were re-discovered in 1941. Picturing it alongside a T. Rex and cinnamon ferns felt somehow, oddly fitting, as if the genes of the tree I'd stood under had drawn the memory of a lost time within its aura, into which I had now stepped. And I felt a longing.
Longing has, for a meditative soul such as mine, no better description than a palpable sense of a stretching of the heart. When I experience that stretch, that pull, that elongation, the "longing" of the heart reaches to a distant place, unknowable to me. Maybe it reaches to places or things gone—a lost home, things no longer as they were. But it feels deeper than that, perhaps reaching to a place that never existed in this lifetime or even to a state of being that exists deep in the genes, long overwritten.
The most fitting term I have found for this longing is the Welsh word, Hiraeth, pronounced "hear-eye-th"—as I think of it, what the hearing and eyes no longer can behold but what lives in the heart.
Dwedwch fawrion o wybodaeth, O ba beth y wnaethpwyd hiraeth,
A pha ddefnydd a roed ynddo, Na ddarfyddo wrth ei wisgo?
Tell me, you of great knowledge, Of what was longing (hiraeth) made, And what material was put into it, That it does not wear out with wearing?
Derfydd aur a derfydd arian, Derfydd melfed, derfydd sidan,
Derfydd pob dilledyn helaeth — Eto er hyn, ni dderfydd hiraeth.
Gold wears out, and silver wears out ... Yet longing (hiraeth) does not wear out.
—Welsh traditional poem
The "longing" of the heart—the pull is strong, narrow, and seemingly directed, a rounded arrowhead, seeking ... not finding, believing perhaps, that it will know "it" when it finds "it." Something is missing, or lost.
The weight of this soulfulness carries a certain beauty. People who can allow themselves to acknowledge the truth and vulnerability of this heartfelt longing seem to relate to others without artifice, real and honest. But what is their recourse when relationships don't assist their healing, or even properly acknowledge it? Whether it's advice from educated professionals who lack the lived experience, lack of empathy masking as wisdom commonly found in spiritual circles, or the well-intentioned advice of friends saying to "just put it behind you," they pack clay into the material that "does not wear out with wearing."
But part of the longing for something mysterious from the past may also include the desire to recover the seed to the healing—the point being that there's not a problem, per se, with longing but we can ease the suffering associated with it. Our ancestors were tribal and shamanistic and their healing ways—tucked into our genes and largely forgotten—along with our hurts, may be calling on us to recall them. As my personal work through the books of and classes with Tenzin Wangyal have proved, someone stuck can heal from shamanistic practices, still practiced by the Tibetan Bon people.
Occasionally, I speak with passersby about whichever dawn redwood I am admiring at that moment. They are surprised to hear the words, "living fossil." And its long forgotten but rediscovered history draws them in. As we part, I know they will tuck that away but most will probably soon forget—this tree that once witnessed the dinosaur era now witnesses ours. Holding the vastness of the history of this living fossil in mind teaches me that the arrow of longing doesn't need to land if the heart expands to embrace the healing also contained in the distance.
