She Was a Tree
The Story of the Half Girl
She was a tree
in a land
where trees have no name.
Once there was a woman, who lived in a small village, far far north where the blizzards wail around the cabin corners on December nights. This woman was giving birth, and since she was giving birth in her own house instead of a hospital that you or I most likely were born in, she was struggling. But she pushed and screamed and breathed and finally gave birth to a healthy baby.
It was a very beautiful baby! A baby girl! The new mother, and the father as well because he was also there, held up the beautiful baby girl and they both noticed something very special. Something peculiar. Something odd.
The baby girl had a perfectly beautiful right eye, and an adorable right arm, and a strong and willful right leg, and in fact, the entire right side of the girl was well-shaped and as healthy as could be! But — the thing was, you see, there was no left side. This baby’s left side was missing entirely. How strange!
The baby grew up to be a toddler, and then the toddler grew up to be a girl, and you know how little girls, and boys for that matter, ask a lot of questions. This girl was a very curious girl, and she kept asking her parents, her grandparents, her neighbors, everyone, why she only had one side. And they always found a very roundabout way of answering her absolutely nothing that remotely satisfied her. She was a stubborn girl and kept asking, always thinking that “This time I will find a way to ask them so they’ll tell me!” but time went on, and on, and on, and she began to slowly see and understand that absolutely no one in her own village understood her! And years came and went, and now the girl was almost an adult.
Now outwardly this girl was smiling and pleasant toward most in the village, but inside she had grown impatient and frustrated, and misunderstood. She felt like she was a stranger in her own world, in her own village, in her own home. She rarely asked anymore why she only had a right side, and no left side. And no one asked her why she never asked that question anymore. The young woman began to make a plan.
One evening in the spring, she told her parents her plan. She was leaving her village. She was a little surprised by how little they protested and how little resistance they gave her. They barely asked why she was leaving. The villagers also seemed quite uninterested in her leaving, and so she began her journey out into the world.
The young woman walked and walked, and time went on. Weeks turned into months, and months turned into years. The woman was walking in a thick redwood forest when she stopped for a while to drink some water. Then she stood and breathed in the smell of the gigantic redwoods, and filled her lungs with the beautiful scent of the humid fragrant air. And she held her breath for a bit longer than usual, you know, I bet you’ve done that sometimes too, so you can hear better.
And that’s when she heard it. A dim but distinctly rushing sound of a large amount of water! Somewhere nearby. Somewhere nearby there was a large amount of water rushing and making its way in a hurry somewhere. The thought of it made the woman filled with a peculiar joy! She began to walk toward the sound of the water, and she walked past many redwood trees until she saw a small trail that lead toward the sunlight. And the trail shone the way in the sunlight until the big trees gave way for smaller trees and smaller trees gave way to bushes and the bushes gave way to a — river!
It was a beautiful sacred river filled with clear sparkling water, and in the middle of the river there was a sandbank, and on the sandbank stood a woman. And the woman had only a left side and no right side! And, what’s more, this woman standing on the sandbank otherwise looked exactly like her!
The woman froze and stared at what clearly seemed to be the other half of herself standing there on the sandbank. It was impossible, wasn’t it? How could this be? How come no one had told her? She began feeling a welling of excitement bubbling up in her belly but she swallowed her dry throat and reconsidered. No! Instead a fear crept up through her right arm and lodged itself in her chest. This other woman, what did she want? “She wants to destroy me!” she thought while staring straight into the eyes of the woman who stood on the sandbank and thought the exact same thing, probably. A spiraling flutter of emotions and thoughts accelerated in the woman’s head until one superior feeling broke through and ignited action: anger!
Without feeling the icy cold water, without barely knowing how she even got to the other side, the woman waded over to the other side, fueled by anger, until she stood right in front of the other woman who only had a left side. Clearly, they were identical! It was infuriating! Neither woman knew who dealt the first blow but it happened, you know how sometimes things can begin and later on no one really knows how it happened? This was such a time. The women fought and fought, and neither gave up so they wrestled and tugged and shoved and hit and bit and kicked and crawled and stomped and — eventually one of them stepped on a rock and the rock rolled and caused both of the women to fall into the rushing river and they were instantly dragged along with the strong current.
They kept fighting. Water now covered their faces, and their nostrils, and they sunk fighting until they were entirely submerged. Left above the water’s surface was only the loud rushing river, and the water speeding as it always does. The redwood trees stood somber and mute. The birds were silent. Time went on, a minute, two minutes, five minutes. Surely the women must have run out of air by now? Ten minutes went by. Then fifteen. Time was struggling to move forward out of worry but on it went and twenty minutes came to an end. Catapulting out of the water emerged one single woman!
This woman gasped for air. She gasped and took in all the air her lungs could hold. It was painful and she tried again. She threw herself on the little sandbank and leaned back and opened her eyes. Her eyes! Instinctively she reached up with her left hand and felt her left eye, and then, she reached up her right hand and felt her right eye!
She was now a whole woman made of the woman who had only a right side and of the woman who had only a left side! Down there, at the bottom of the powerful and sacred river the two women had merged into one, and here she was now, risen from the sacred water, something new, something she couldn’t quite yet grasp. She looked around with her two eyes, and they wouldn’t quite obey her so they twirled around in their own ways spinning this way and that. It took her several days to get her two eyes to collaborate, and then she began to walk home, back home to her childhood village. She had a longing to see her parents.
It took her a long time to journey back to her own village, but she arrived one afternoon, and began to ask for her parents. The villagers shrugged their shoulders and were not particularly helpful but also not particularly rude. They just had a sort of roundabout way of not imparting much information this way or that. The woman looked and looked but could not find her parents. Finally she left the village and kept walking.
The next day she came to another, much smaller village. She noticed a house that had a beautiful garden, and outside the house sat an old couple. The woman walked up to them and asked them if they happened to have any extra food because she had been walking far. The old woman’s eyes began to water and she exclaimed: “Don’t you recognize us, dear daughter?” and the old man weeped: “We’ve sat here waiting for you a very very long time, dear daughter!” And they told the woman that this was what all children in the village had to do to find their other half. They had to go out into the world to do so, and they had always hoped she would one day return as a whole girl.
They said to her that sometimes people returned without their whole self. It happens, you know. But this woman was whole and she loved the little village. She often sat underneath a large oak tree and children began gathering around there to listen to her. She would tell them stories about the world, and about her adventures, and about large trees that grow even further north, and about strange fish that swim in fast waters in a sacred river, and about the time she first saw with both her eyes. And you know how it is with children, they listen yes, but they don’t always listen with both ears…
Time went on. Years passed, and one day the woman died. One of the children, who now was a full grown man, arranged for her to be buried near the oak tree where she loved sitting. And time went on. During a wild October storm the oak tree fell because it was old. It fell over the gravesite of the woman. Years passed.
And one day, a tree began to sprout from the dead tree trunk that lay near the woman’s grave. In fact, the woman still had a bit of that sacred river water in her, and with its strength her spirit crawled out of the grave and into the sprouting new oak tree and that is why you sometimes see them sparkle — the young oak saplings — in sunshine.
Now I wonder, where do you see yourself in this story? Where did you first begin to notice something? What was that something? Allow yourself to linger in that moment for a bit and don’t worry about analyzing it too much. Just revisit the feeling and moment. Is there something, like a notion, that you might be able to pinch? Like a little string of silk, and hold on to it for a moment? Try it!
This story was originally told to me (and you) by
in his wonderful podcast Jawbone, and I just committed a terrible faux pas by not narrating it out loud. (I hope Martin Shaw forgives me.) This time around I decided to write it so I could learn it. And I decided to share this draft with you as a raw piece of evidence. A sort of test. Can I do it? Did I remember it well enough? My goal is to learn it and then narrate it out loud.The thing is, I know this tree. I have always known this tree. I drew it again and again as a child. The same tree. The gnarly oak tree. Oak trees did not grow where I grew up. But it was a tree I already knew before I saw it in real life many years later. Many years later I saw it on a knobby windswept hill in Marin County, and I came to call it The Coyote Tree.
I called it The Coyote Tree because one morning I saw a coyote sit on one of its lowest branches. I have never seen a coyote climb a tree before. It just sat there on the branch, and the morning sunshine and mist and fog wrapped itself over the landscape and everything seemed, well, sacred.
I was a tree
in a land
where trees have no name.
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