Restraining with Restraint
On a day with sun almost strong enough to make a shadow, I venture into the maze of branches.
A long-neglected Japanese maple reaches wildly in all directions. It’s a crimson dwarf dissectum, leaves deeply lobed and lacy—a variety that makes beautiful droopy shapes if tended well. Planted in front of the living room window by someone long before we moved here, the tree got a preliminary butchering two years ago, when a guy with a big machine needed to work where robust branches hung, and I didn’t have the right tool.
Before going on with this story, I want to detour and share how Robin Wall Kimmerer solved a certain language problem that matters here. In English, every being is either male, female, or it. Setting aside the challenge this poses for non-binary folk, and their fierce creativity in addressing it, our hand-me-down language does not recognize anything as animate unless it is identifiably male or female. That might work for cats and rats and horses. But what about a mushroom? A Sitka spruce? It and it.
Imagine your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and someone says, “Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair.” We might snicker at such a mistake; at the same time we recoil. ... And yet in English, we speak of our beloved Grandmother Earth in exactly that way: as “it.” The language allows no form of respect for the more-than-human beings with whom we share the Earth.
—Robin Wall Kimmerer
Accordingly, Kimmerer proposes a pronoun that recognizes animacy: ki. Beetles, and moss, and the owl we hear in the night? Ki. (A whole flock: kin.) In Kimmerer’s ancestral Potawatomi language—and most other Indigenous languages, she notes—the world around us is as animate as family. “Because they are our family.”1 Truly, read the essay: “Nature Needs a New Pronoun: To Stop the Age of Extinction, Let’s Start by Ditching 'It'” for her clear-eyed thinking and clever derivation.
So, spring was long-delayed hereabouts, and it’s been hard to watch the maple spend ki’s energy and nutrients developing leaves and twigs that I might cut off. Finally, we have a day with sun almost strong enough to make a shadow, and I venture into the maze of branches.
There is no question of animacy when something’s growing over the walkway, or straight for the window. When you prune by looking for a growth bud, because just above it is the place to snip or saw. And before blade meets wood, you step back and imagine the stem that will sprout from the various buds, then pick the one that’s best.
I am accompanied—no, reinforced—by the voice of Sinéad O’Conner singing Kurt Cobain’s lines, “In the sun, in the sun I feel as one.” A good setting for corrective pruning. The guiding principle here is to remove branches that cross. They abrade each other, and indeed, some of this wood looks to be ailing or injured.
But, hang on. Wonder of wonders, I see places where raw wood has recognized itself in itself and unleashed the force that forms new wood.
The gaze of wood upon wood not returned, but joined. Inosculation is the botanical term for this process, and it’s used to graft English walnuts onto black walnut rootstock. Your favorite rose onto a hardier variety. Inosculation is also what is going on when two trees grow so close together that they merge. These are sometimes called “marriage trees,” especially when they are different species.
Inosculation is the healing of a wound by finding common ground with the irritant and together forming something stronger. (An insight that pulls me in a lot of directions, but I’m sticking with the tree.) Dare I prevent all inosculation by this pruning? What is the role of restraint here?
In my first marriage, he planted and harvested. I mowed, weeded, pruned. I grew to love pruning—it is oddly creative and inspires me to consider the branches of my own being. Where do they receive good light? Or irritate each other?
It’s not always clear which of the maple’s youngest twigs and branches will transgress by crossing. Snip the twig that is smaller? Or the one that is awkwardly placed? That sprouts from a weak branch? (So many directions to go here, but I’m sticking with the tree.)
Some of these new twigs seem to have knocked each other loose from their little branches, maybe in a big wind, or beneath a big crow, or when a big human blundered about. Maybe it’s OK to restrain my restraining. To wait and watch the tenderer twigs.
To take the time to gaze and see what gazes back, inviting connection. Maybe even joining together to make something stronger. I’m inspired here by another Gregory Orr poem, out of the same book I wrote about last time.
By looking toward the light (what is Light for you?), the poet was able to see “each object gilded and glowing.” Earlier in the same book, Orr quotes Sappho (also shared earlier): “Whatever one loves most / Is beautiful.”2 Things that are gilded and glowing are also beautiful. So… when I see beauty, my loving gaze might be meeting the gaze of Light. What if I were to ask ki what we could make by joining together? For certain, my eyes would be opened to the sacred life all around me.
Reading on, two pages after “Facing away from the light,” Orr describes the human heart as a labyrinth. “One more reason / to explore it. // It’s dark and confusing / inside us. / Doesn’t the poem bring light?”3
The maze of the crimson dissectum (a good description of how my heart has felt a time or two, and yes, dark and confusing) is shaded now. Tomorrow, again, the sun will illuminate ki.
Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), p. 55.
Gregory Orr. Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (Port Townshend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), p. 25.
ibid. p. 79.