Wrote a book and lived to tell about it

Shall we talk a little about it?

A year and a half ago the tallest tree in New York fell. My friend Philip was hiking with another friend when they found it and alerted nearby forest rangers to her. Her name was Tree 103 and she stood alongside her sisters for more than three hundred years in a place near me called Elders Grove. When she fell, one nearby forestry professor said, she would have produced the energy equivalent to several sticks of dynamite.

Last fall my friend Philip and I paddled a nearby pond we love, whispering to one another across the water about loons and lichen, and afterwards, he and I hiked back to the fallen tree. Someday I will tell you about that walk through an old growth oasis. Some say the word Adirondack comes from the Mohawk word, ha-de-ron-dah, meaning “eater of trees.” It probably refers to a neighboring tribe who were known to sometimes eat bark, but I like to think it referred to the rampant logging that white settlers brought to the area in the 17 and 1800s. Somehow Tree 103 and her sisters were spared, but again, that’s a story for another time.

This hike we took coincided with a crashing and crumbling fall in my own life. That fall had begun seven years earlier.

On the night former President Trump was elected, I was sitting on the couch in our DC home with Nate and Harper. We popped popcorn. We settled in with a patchwork blanket and opened my laptop to watch. We felt dissatisfied with both candidates that year, but never thought Trump would win. I went to bed later that night and felt a pit in my stomach that hasn’t left since.

Later, a study released saying that 81% of Evangelicals voted for him. I don’t know if I was just blind or ignorant or naive, but suddenly, all these people I knew and loved supporting someone whose politics I didn’t like but understood, but whose character I couldn’t imagine supporting. I felt like a stranger to them and they to me. I asked, “Who are these people?” and a somewhat more gutting question, “Who am I?”

Fast-forward a few years to the pandemic. Never in my lifetime has there been such a clear dividing line. Politics, as fraught as they can be, still usually let us mingle with one another to some degree. But suddenly, not only were we isolated in person, our ideals became more and more isolated from one another. The echo-chambers reverberated out capturing good, well-meaning people in their web. Suddenly people who I know care deeply about children were talking about child trafficking and pizza-gate. Friends were boycotting Wayfair. People were leaving churches right and left because of mask requirements or stances on Black Lives Matter. When the vaccination was available, the frenzy had reached fever-pitch.

During those early days of the pandemic Nate and I had moved back to the place where I spent many formative years of my life. I knew it wouldn’t be an easy move—we didn’t plan on attending my former church and there aren’t a lot of other church options in the area, and my relationships with the members of my family who live here are not strong. But we love this area and we knew we could love our dilapidated home into beauty and love this town and try to let her love us back. But we didn’t expect the blow that was about to come our way.

In November, the election, in January, the insurrection, in March, the vaccine, in July, the worst of it all for us, my oldest brother reported for sexually abusing two children. His church (my former church) had known about the abuse for four years and chose to not report it to authorities or inform their congregation on purpose. Relationships between Nate and I, and the church and my family were already fragile because of the election and pandemic and our choice to not attend the church, but this crashed through our lives with splinters and shards and the sound of dynamite.

There was no coming back.

When asked about the dead tree, the forestry professor said, “Dead, yes, but I prefer to think that [she’s] just not vertical anymore.”¹

What do we do, I’ve been asking myself the past few years, when the landscape around us is unrecognizable? When all the things we’ve—for better or worse—put our trust in, have fallen around us? What do we do when the most deeply rooted relationships of our lives cannot bear up around us or we cannot bear up around them any longer? How do we make it through? Can we make it through?

Is there any life at all in what appears to be dead?

I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I knew I would have to write my way through them. There never has been any other way for me. I scribbled these words from Marion Roach Smith on a card above my desk, “I have told the truth but not the whole truth. To tell the whole truth is a fool’s errand.” And so that is what I did. I wrote my way through the truth, which wasn’t so black and white as I thought and not so clear as my anger or grief said it should be. It was messy and it hurt and it was hard, but it was also healing in ways I didn’t expect. When I press on what hurt so excruciatingly two years ago, I feel only tenderness there now. Tenderness for myself, tenderness for those who chose differently than me, tenderness for the us we are all becoming.

I took to the forest floor (and let me tell you, in winter that was a feat indeed!) and let it teach me about rootedness and resilience even when we’re “just not vertical anymore.” I snowshoed a labyrinth and climbed mountains and measured trees and laid on moss covered rocks and spiked a fever that turned out to be covid while hiking in old growth in the rain. I forest bathed and put my hands in soil and pressed it to my face. I researched fungi and listened to lichen and counted rings. I read over a hundred books and two hundred poems about the forest, trees, and the land. I learned what it meant to simply be here, to not borrow tomorrow’s trouble or yesterday’s heartbreak.

Honestly, I’m still learning.

And also, oh, I wrote a book about it all. I’m still too close to have handed in the first draft to know if it’s any good (almost none of us think our work is good after staring at it as much as we have at that point), but it felt really good to write.

One nature writer says, “To understand the tree in its death is to first understand the tree in its life.”² This is what I set out to do, to understand the life of a tree from the perspective of what’s beneath the tree, what’s known as the understory. And, in doing so, to try and understand the thunderous shattering of what felt sure before the past few years. I wanted to look beneath the story that the news cycle told and social media told, and even the story I told myself, and see what was really there.

I’ve been itching to talk more about it and I will, but not for a while yet. For now, here’s the title and subtitle: The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience From the Forest Floor.

It will be available for preorder in October and that’s when I’ll show you the cover too.

In the meantime, I just wanted to invite you into my joy and invite you to share your own story of rootedness and resilience in the comments if you’d like to.

Thank you, friends. Thank you for the time and space and, goodness gracious, the fact that you show up here still throwing subscription cash monies at me while I’m eyeball deep in a manuscript that won’t write itself. I’ll never stop being grateful for you, ever, ever. Ever.

Bseid

Have you ordered my latest book? A Curious Faith: The Questions God Asks, We Ask, and Wish Someone Would Ask Us. Available now, wherever books are sold:Amazon | Baker Book House | Bookshop

Also available: Handle With Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

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1. https://www.newyorker.com/news/afterword/the-tallest-known-tree-in-new-york-falls-in-the-forest

2. Jon Luoma, The Hidden Forest