GRANDMOTHER APPLE
I am blessed to be participating in the Seminary of the Wild training program as a container to deepen my practice. A core thing we do is weekly wanders where we engage with our kin in the more than human world. This is my retelling of my engagement with Grandmother Apple. The wander occurred in late September, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
I continued down the path in Pisgah State Park and came to a place with some beautiful yellow flowers that almost looked like sunflowers. There was a sign that this had been a field and there was a slight path in it. My intuition said follow the path, so I did. I passed one dead tree that I thought had been an apple tree and then I was drawn to another tree further into the field. I bushwhacked my way to the tree (there was no path). This was an old apple tree and I felt drawn to sit with her. After asking permission I sat under her mostly dead branches, not quite against the trunk because I couldn’t get there because there were vines and something brambly growing up underneath. I lay down on my back with my head on my pack. I just listened. I told grandmother apple thank you for being here. She wanted to show me some scenes of when she was younger and showed me kids running around the farm, sheep on the pasture in front of me, her limbs heavy with apples. She longed for when she had been cared for and loved. She said it was too late for her, she was tired and she was dying, but she wanted me to care for some land. She missed interacting with humans, she was lonely. We’d abandoned her. It wasn’t bitter, just a statement of fact, mixed with a sense of longing. I asked if I could pluck two of the three apples I saw, one to eat and one for the lulav, and she was grateful to give me her fruit. I promised to visit her again next year if I was able.
Buber famously refused to answer the question of whether the tree can communicate with people. I suppose if I had a reputation to maintain, I might also be silent, but I don’t. So I can say unequivocally that loving interactions are possible between us and our kin. What’s your experience, if any, with sharing with the more than human world?
