Photo by Mark Kassinos
Last summer I read The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak, and was captivated by the story of a fig tree that was transported from its warm island home to the cold, inhospitable (for fig trees) climate of England. In order to survive the long, cold winters, the fig tree is pushed into the ground and buried every winter. (Yes, I googled this - burying fig trees in cold climates is a real thing.)
Each fall, the fig tree’s roots are severed on one side and the trunk of the tree is incrementally pushed towards a hole in the ground on the opposite side of the cut roots. Once in the ground, the tree is covered with soil, even the leaves. Sheets of plywood are laid over the buried tree and then weighed down with stones.
After the last frost, the stones are rolled back, and the fig tree is coaxed, gently, back into an upright position. The severed roots are returned to the earth; softly covered in fresh, dark soil. The leaves are shaken free of the heaviness that weighed them down.
What a vision of resurrection.
If I close my eyes, I can imagine her pale face gasping at the emerging, early spring light. Her branches tentatively reaching for the sun, after days – no, months – of indeterminable darkness. And I imagine she whispers to herself, okay, maybe I can do this one more time.
I had such a visceral reaction to reading this and felt the tree speaking the language of our grief. The cycles and waves of drowning and resurfacing. Maybe there is wisdom in these cycles – for without spells of darkness, the fig tree would not survive her new life in this distant, cold landscape. And maybe our tender hearts also need these periods of darkness to survive our new landscape of loss as well.
Like the fig tree, my new life is punctuated by these seasons of being weighed down in darkness, not knowing when, or if I will resurface. Only with time (and often unexpectedly), does the weight of sadness shift.
And when the sadness shifts, as it always does, as it always has, I turn towards the early light. Holding my hands up to shield my eyes as the stones are rolled back, as the sunlight seeps into the space between the broken pieces, I whisper, okay, maybe I can do this one more time.
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