The tree that owes you nothing

Light on the ridge. Not much of it. The sun hasn’t come over the far ridge yet. What light there is comes in sideways from the east, and it’s on the tops of the oaks and nothing underneath them.

It is already got the day in it. Late August air. You can feel that before you see anything at all. The first thing I do is take my jacket off and put it round my waist, and I regret that for the rest of the morning.

Bo is out ahead of me somewhere in the dark under those oaks. I can hear him moving. I can’t see him.

There is one frog left in this cove and he has the whole place to himself.

Here’s what happened. It has two parts, and I’ve been sitting on both of them since the first of June.

There is a hickory at the low fork where the trail comes off the ridge and starts dropping toward the creek. Everybody who walks this knows the tree. I have walked past it about ninety times since June.

It is a bad tree. I want to be plain about that, because I’ve been saying bad tree to myself about that tree for three months.

It forks low. It leans. There is no straight run on it anywhere, from the ground to the first good branch, which isn’t far up.

If you wanted a hickory for something, you would walk past it. And I have walked past it. And every single time I looked at it, there was a small list going.

Now hear the shape of the list, because this is where it turns stupid.

The list was never a plan. It was a verdict.

I decided that tree was no good somewhere in June. Everything I did after that was paperwork. I wasn’t finding anything out. I was tidying a decision I had already made.

That is the first part.

The second part is what I did about it.

Three visits. About five minutes each. I took a folding saw and a pair of loppers out to that tree. I cleared the brush off the ground around the base of it. Two saplings. A blackberry. Some dead wood going soft.

I told myself I was just tidying. I told myself I was making room so a person could walk in there when the time came.

The time hasn’t come. It has been three months.

And here’s the part I don’t like.

Pull the brush away from the base of a big tree. Loosen the ground around it. Walk in on it twice after that.

You are not tidying. You are working on the roots. And the roots are the whole arrangement.

So I’ve been hurting a tree I didn’t even want. On purpose. For reasons I made up.

And I’ve been annoyed at that tree the entire time, as if it were doing something to me.

I never wanted to cut it. That is the funny part. There is no version of this where I want to cut it. Not once. I only ever wanted to have decided about it.

So here’s the question for today.

Why is it so hard to look at a tree and not want anything from it?

And there’s a second question, and it’s the worse one.

Why can I only manage that with a tree I have already decided is no good?

I want to be careful that you have both of those, because I’m only going to ask them once.

The first one is about every tree.

The second one is about me, and it’s the one I have actually been working on.

If you only carry one of them out of here, carry that one.

I’ve been carrying both of those since June, and now I’m going to go and get at them.

The list was the whole relationship. Every time I looked at it I ran the list, and every time I ran the list I looked at it less.

I want to tell you what I’ve been doing since June. Then I want to tell you what I’ve been reading.

And then I want to walk with you for ten minutes, and find out whether either of them helps. So. The faster half of today.

First I want to tell you where I’m borrowing from. This one takes a while, and I’d rather you knew that.

The name is Zhuangzi. I have said it before, so I’ll say it fast. It is a name for an old Chinese book, and also for the man some people say wrote it.

Fourth century before our era. That is as close as I can get to a date, and I’m not going to pretend to better than that.

Nobody can prove one man wrote all of it. The book is a shelf of arguments. Some of it is serious. Some of it is two men enjoying an afternoon.

Here is the world it’s arguing with, because that’s the part people skip, and it’s the part I needed.

It was a bad century to be alive in. The old arrangement that had been holding things together was coming apart, and the fighting wasn’t going to stop.

Rulers wanted everything counted and taxed. And there were men saying, out loud, that all that old ceremony and music and expense was a weight nobody could carry.

Everything was being asked to justify itself.

Produce something. Pay for what you cost. Be worth the ground you’re standing on.

And into the middle of that comes a book with a tree in it.

There is a passage in it about a big tree. His friend brings it up. The same friend from the bridge, the one called Huizi. He has this huge tree, all knots and crooked branches, standing right by the road, and not one carpenter will look at it twice. Too twisted to take a single board off.

And the answer he gets is, more or less, good. Put it out in the open country. Wander around under it. Take a nap in its shade. Nobody is ever going to come for it with an axe.

That is the tree, as near as I can tell it without reading it to you.

Then, a few chapters on, the book comes at the same thing from the other side. The trees that do get cut down are the ones with something to give. The one with the bark you can eat. The one with the sap you can use.

So the book has it both ways round, and then it doesn’t say very much more.

Now the part that matters. I’m not going to say his line. I’m going to say mine.

The useful trees are the ones that get taken.

That is the turn in the whole passage, and it’s most of the turn in the whole book.

The minute a thing gets measured by what it hands you, it’s on a list. And things on lists have a bad time.

A tree that hands you nothing has nothing to lose.

I want to sit with that. It took me a while, and I don’t think it’s only about trees.

That same old book is full of people who can’t get loose. Somebody hands them the standard answer, which is loosen up and accept how things are. This man thinks that answer is too cheap to live on.

So he’s against usefulness as the measure.

He is also against people who have swapped the measuring for something quieter and worse, which is being no trouble.

Now the price of it, because I don’t get to keep an idea this good for nothing.

If a tree owes me nothing, then I’m standing very close to saying that a person owes me nothing. And I don’t want to be near that sentence.

Because there’s a short walk from the tree to the person. I have taken it before. I have looked at somebody I work with and run a list on them. The same list. The same one I run on that hickory.

A little list. Nothing dramatic. Just an accounting of what they have done this week and whether it comes out.

And the accounting is never fair, because you’re the one keeping it.

There is a second price, and it’s the one that actually got me.

It is a comfortable idea. Comfortable ideas are the dangerous ones, and I’ve got to say that out loud because I can hear myself wanting it.

I don’t want to be a man who has decided that usefulness is a trap.

That is only a preference with a book behind it. That is worse. That is the same list with a nicer cover on it.

So I’m holding it loose. I don’t think I get to have it as a rule. I think I get to have it as a question.

And it’s the one I asked you at the top of this walk.

Now. A second voice, and a better one, and I’ve got to set him up properly.

The name is Alan Watts. Nineteen fifteen to nineteen seventy three.

English. Most of his life in America.

He had a long stretch in the fifties and sixties, talking to people who had never thought about any of it.

Here is how to hold him, and I’m being careful because people get this wrong in both directions.

He isn’t my authority. He isn’t the man in the book. He is a man in his own right who made an argument. I agree with about two thirds of it, and I’ll tell you where I don’t.

And I want to be honest about something. I didn’t read him in order, over years, like a student. I heard him.

He was a talker. He talked better than he wrote, and what I actually have is pieces of that from a long time ago.

Now. What was he arguing with.

The same thing, one place over from the old Chinese book, and much later.

By the middle of that century the world had gone technical, and the picture people had of the world was a mechanism. A very large, very fine mechanism, outside of you. It had parts. You could take it apart and hold a piece of it.

Which is a genuinely useful picture. I want to say that before I go on. It is useful and it is not a lie.

Here is what he kept pointing at. There is no place to stand to look at the world from. You cannot get outside of it, because you are made of the same stuff and you’re in it while you look.

And the moment you think you’re outside of it, it becomes a supply.

That is his disagreement with the tree. Mine was that the useful trees get taken. His was that the list came before the tree. We weren’t saying the same thing at all.

Now. The word. He had a word for what the world is actually like.

I’m not going to give you the sentence it came out of. That sentence is his.

But I’m going to say the word.

Wiggly.

That is the whole idea, and he said it better than I ever will. One word is as much as I’m taking.

Because a wiggly thing cannot be finished. It does not arrive. And if it cannot be finished, then there’s nothing at the end of it to get to.

A person walking toward the end of a walk is going to be miserable on it.

Now the other half of him, which is the half this walk is really about.

Play.

He made a case that a lot of what we call aiming is play that got serious, and forgot it was play.

A thing done for the doing. Where the doing is the whole point and there is no other point.

His argument was that the moment you put a goal on it, you have changed it into work.

Work wants finishing. And finishing is what everybody actually wants, and nobody can have.

Be careful here. He is easy to get wrong in the direction of not caring. That is not what he was saying, as far as I can tell.

Play isn’t not doing it. Play is doing it with the whole of you and not holding yourself at a distance from it while you do.

I have the opposite problem, which is that I’ve been holding myself at a distance from a tree for three months.

Let me say the objection out loud, because it’s a real one and it’s not mine.

People knew that material far longer than he did, and some of them didn’t think he got it right. I am not going to pretend that disagreement sits on one side only. I’m not going to settle it for you either.

What it costs, holding him.

If everything is play, then nothing can be held to. Choosing is play. Committing is play. Being wrong is play.

And I need some things to have weight. I need this walk to count. I need the work to be hard on the days it’s hard.

So I take the tree and I leave the door open.

Back to the ridge for a second.

I’ve been up here talking about the twentieth century and the fourth century, and I’d like to come back down.

That hickory at the low fork is not the only tree on this trail that forks low.

I walk a mile and a half through oak and hickory and cedar and elm.

I could pick you out twenty trees that would make a man shake his head.

And there’s one job on this ridge that none of them are suited for.

It is the job I had for them.

So that’s the fast half. That is the part where the ideas go by.

Now I want to be unpleasant about myself for a while.

I’ve got about half an hour, and I’d rather spend it here than spend it selling you the book.

The first thing I got wrong is small and I’ve been wrong about it since June.

I’ve been telling myself I was annoyed at that tree.

I wasn’t annoyed at the tree. I’ve never once been annoyed at a tree in my life. Trees don’t do anything to me.

I was annoyed at a decision I had already made. I put that tree on a list in June, and then went on being annoyed with it as if it had put it there.

That is the whole crime, and it took me three months and two old books to work out.

Second thing, and this one is worse.

I’ve been reading about this for weeks. The old Chinese book, and the Englishman, and one more I’ll get to. I want a fair tree, you see. I want the tree to be somebody else.

And here’s what I have actually been doing. Walking past that hickory for three months, and for the last two weeks of it with a reason in my pocket.

The reading is not why I am doing it. The reading is where I put the reason.

That is what a book is for me most of the time. Not to change my mind. To have somewhere to put the thing I’m already doing.

I have done that with the Laozi material and I have done it with this. I’m not proud of it.

Third thing. The plan.

I want to report the plan correctly, because the plan didn’t survive.

I had one. Cut it in the winter. The wood is harder when the sap is down. The ground is firmer. You can get in there without the mud going to soup.

That was the plan. It was a good plan. It was a better plan than anything I have actually done all year.

I’ve never cut anything in my life. Not a branch, not a limb. I own a folding saw and I have never opened it.

So the plan is going to meet me again in February, and I don’t know what happens then.

Fourth thing, and this is the part I actually wanted to get to.

I thought that noticing the list would fix it.

It hasn’t fixed it. It has made it a nicer thing to do.

I have caught myself running that list four times this week, and not once did I catch it. Knowing the name of the thing hasn’t slowed it down one single time.

I want to be honest about what that leaves me holding.

The old book with the useless tree is still true. The Englishman is still right that the picture of the world is a thing we add. None of it has made me kinder to one hickory tree.

So I have given up on the idea that a good idea about trees will fix me.

I’m going to stop walking for a minute. I’ve got to the part where I’d rather be sitting down.

Bo has stopped too. He is at the low fork with his nose in the leaf litter and he’s not going to be hurried. I have made my peace with him about this.

While I sit here I want to say what I’m not going to do next.

I’m not going to have a resolution about the tree. Nobody in this story is getting a resolution about the tree.

Here is the last thing in this part, and then I’m going to change the subject completely.

When I caught myself running the list this week, I noticed something that I didn’t expect.

I do it in a particular spot. It is the last twenty yards before the low fork, and something about that twenty yards makes the list run.

Not the tree. The last twenty yards.

Because by the last twenty yards I have already decided what’s going to happen.

Then I look at the tree to check that my decision was right.

Which is not looking at a tree. That is looking at a photograph of my own decision.

So the list isn’t a habit I’ve got. It is a thing I walk into, every morning, at about the fifty minute mark, and it’s waiting for me there.

That is as far as I get. I have no idea what to do with it.

So I’m going to do the thing I do when an idea stops helping.

I’m going to go and look at the actual thing instead of the story about it.

And this next part is slower. It is the slowest thing I’ll say today.

If you’re walking somewhere busy, skip it and come back for the exercise at the end.

So. The slow half. This is the naturalist version, and it’s the part I have gone back over four or five times to get right.

First thing. Forget me. Here is what that tree is doing.

Not for me. For the ground. For the cove. For everything on this ridge that’s not me.

Start with the wood itself, because this is the thing I had backwards.

I’ve been walking past this as if the good trees are the trees and the others are failures. It is the other way round.

In a wood like this, a straight clean trunk from the ground to the first branch is the rare thing. The straight ones are the ones somebody took. This ridge has been cut twice, by two generations of people who needed a log they could saw straight.

So the twenty trees I could pick out that would make a man shake his head aren’t twenty mistakes. They are the twenty that stayed.

I want to say that without making it precious. A crooked hickory is worse for boards. That is true. It just doesn’t matter as much as I made it sound on the way up here.

Next. The shade.

It is late August. At eight in the morning this trail is fine. At two in the afternoon the ridge isn’t a place, it’s an oven.

And the difference between the trail under the canopy and the county road is fifteen feet of standing timber.

Oak, hickory, elm. Fifteen feet between me and the sun.

I have no thermometer. I’m not going to give you a number. I know it’s cooler under there by a lot. I know it by the dog, who won’t cross that road in the afternoon and has never once been talked round it.

Next. The thing I was cutting into.

The ground under that tree is not soil. It is roots, and the roots are holding the dirt on a slope that wants to wash into the creek.

That is what my loppers were working on. Not a tidy bit of garden. The whole arrangement.

Next. The room in the tree.

That hickory forks low, so it has got a crotch in it.

In a crotch like that there’s a hollow sooner or later.

And a hollow in a tree is a room, and the animals that live in rooms in trees can’t build a room in a tree. They can’t cut one. It has to already be there.

Squirrels. Raccoons, further up. Birds that need a hole in a trunk and won’t make one themselves.

I have spent three months looking at that tree and seeing a bad trunk.

There is a room in it.

And here’s the one that got me, because it took me two walks to see it.

Trees don’t have a waste line.

They take what the ground has spare, and they put it back into the ground as they go.

As leaves, and as what the leaves turn into. Nothing leaves. It goes round and round in the same small district for a very long time.

That hickory isn’t producing anything for anybody. It is moving minerals around inside a cove in Missouri.

Now the honest part, and I’ll not leave it out.

A hickory is a useful tree.

The wood splits. People smoke meat with it. There is a nut on it every fall, and somebody has been working on that nut for two hundred years.

The squirrels were at it long before that.

So the tree isn’t useless. It is useful to about four groups of mammals, and one of them is me, on the wrong week of the year.

And that’s the whole argument, and I have arrived at it slowly, and it took me longer than it should have.

I’m going to stop again here.

This next part is the one I’ve got to be slow about, and I’d rather be sitting down for it.

Bo has gone back down to the water on his own business.

I’m on this dry shelf of rock with my back against a sycamore.

Two men in one morning. An ancient one and an English one. And at this point on the walk I realised that both of them are arguing with the same thing, from two ends of it.

And now I’m going to bring in one more man, and this is the last one.

The name is Schopenhauer. Seventeen eighty eight to eighteen sixty. German.

I’m borrowing one thing from him and I’m not borrowing it happily.

Here is his situation, because it matters. He is writing at the start of the nineteen hundreds, in a Europe that had become extremely sure of itself.

Things were being made, and made well, and it had become normal to ask what a thing was for.

Sound it out next to the fourth century before our era. Different world, same question going down the road.

Now the idea, and I’m not going to say his words.

He said that wanting isn’t something that happens to a clean look afterwards.

He said the wanting is already in the seeing. That the eye doesn’t arrive neutral and then form an opinion. That it arrives, and it’s already asking.

I’ve been carrying this one round since I was twenty.

I’ve never once agreed with it, and I’ve never once been able to put it down.

Because he’s right that the list runs in the last twenty yards, and the tree didn’t put it there.

And if he’s right about that, then what I asked you at the top of this walk can’t be done the way I meant.

That is where the morning turned over on me, about halfway down the hill.

I asked it wrong. I asked it as if there were a way of looking at a thing with nothing in it, like a clean window.

And then you would see what was actually there.

There isn’t a clean window. That is what this man says. That is also what the tree on the slope says, from a different direction, having never heard of this gentleman.

Here is what it costs to hold that.

It costs the hope. If the wanting is already in the seeing, then there’s no moment of arrival.

No moment where you got there clean and the world showed up unasked.

That isn’t nothing. Plenty of people have built a whole morning on arriving clean.

And there’s a worse way to lose it. You can take this idea and say that wanting is just what looking looks like, so nothing counts.

And then you haven’t found freedom. You have found a very tidy way of not starting.

I have done that one too. That is what the play idea was, for about three weeks in the spring.

So here’s where I have landed, and it took me a whole morning to get here and I’m not entirely sure of it.

You don’t get a clean look. You don’t get to arrive at a thing with your hands empty.

What you get is the want arriving later than you thought it did, and after it has already arrived.

That is much smaller than what I wanted. It is also the only version of it I have ever actually seen happen.

Let me stand back up. The light has come down off the tops and onto the trail and my legs have got going again.

So here’s where the three of them have left me.

Standing on a dirt road with a dog who has been right about the weather all morning.

An old book says the useful trees get taken.

An Englishman says we handed ourselves a picture of the world and then priced it.

A German says the wanting was already in the eye before the looking started.

And a field on a ridge in Missouri says none of those three is the reason a tree is there.

That last one isn’t very dramatic, and it’s the one I believe.

Now the honest case against all of it.

I’ve got about fifteen minutes left, and I’d rather use it on the objection than on a summary.

None of this adds up to one answer.

I’m holding a book that says trees are better than nothing.

I’m holding a man who says life doesn’t finish. A German who says you’re not going to get a clean look.

And I’m standing on a ridge full of trees that couldn’t care less about any of them.

They are four different arguments wearing the same coat. I’ve been holding them together all morning by walking in the same direction.

And I want to say the other thing, which is the thing I actually think.

The first twenty minutes of this walk I was solving a problem about a tree.

And then at some point after the second turn, I stopped solving it.

The walk got better anyway. And nothing came out of my mouth that would have helped anybody.

And that’s the whole thing I have learned from a tree this summer, and it is not much, and I would like it anyway.

Now. You have all been out there on your own walks with me, and I’ve got something to put back out.

So. I asked you, a while back, for one word.

One word from your week. Out of all the weeks so far, here’s what came back.

Deadfall.

Hickory.

Sawdust.

The one at the fence.

Cedar.

Mulberry. And don’t touch that one.

My neighbour’s walnut.

Sycamore.

I want to play those back properly, because they weren’t what I expected.

There is not one person who sent me the word trees.

Not one. Every single one of you sent a tree you know. That one at the fence. Your neighbour’s. The one you shouldn’t touch.

So all of you are already doing this. You have all got a tree and you didn’t have to be asked.

And several of you sent something that hurt, which I’m not going to make a thing of, but I heard it.

Two of them came in as long sentences, and I want to be straight with you about those.

I don’t have a way to write back to people who send these in. I haven’t built one. So if you sent a long one and nobody answered, that’s not you being ignored, that’s a gap in my end of this.

And I’m certainly not going to read somebody’s hard week out loud on a trail.

Now. There is a second question buried in this walk and I haven’t answered it yet, so I’m going to.

The second question was the worse one, and it has a short answer, and the short answer isn’t flattering.

I’ve got an answer and it is not the one I wanted.

I cannot hold the wanting lightly about anything I have not finished judging.

That is it. That is the whole thing. It isn’t a moral. It is just how it goes.

The moment I have decided, the looking is over. I’m not seeing it any more. I’m checking it.

Which is why the trees I have enjoyed most this year are all ones I had no opinion about in January.

The sycamore by the water at the bottom of the cove. I’ve never once thought about that tree. I put my hand on it in June because there was nowhere else to put my hand.

And there’s something suspicious about a man whose best relations with a tree depend on having no opinion about it.

But I have decided not to solve that this morning. I’ve got eleven minutes of walking left and a dog who has stopped pretending to be busy.

Here is the one takeaway of this morning, and then I’m going to hand you ten minutes.

The tree was never in the business of you. Every item on that list was one sided from the first day.

Which means the owing is not something the tree fails to do. The owing is entirely something two people invented, and one of them was me.

Right. Ten minutes. This is the part you actually do something in.

We are going to walk. Not far. Ten minutes, one walk, and I’ll tell you what to do and then I’ll shut up and let you do it.

You can do it at the end of this walk or later today.

If you have already walked today, don’t do it twice. That isn’t a rule. That is a hint from somebody who has done it twice and regretted it.

Here is the practice. Three parts, and the whole thing is under ten minutes.

The whole exercise is the sentence and the minute. Everything I have said to you in the last fifty minutes is in service of being able to stand there for one minute.

Before I say part one, I’m going to make you pick it properly, because this is the bit people get wrong.

Do not pick a famous tree. Do not go somewhere special to do this.

Pick the one you already had an opinion about. You will know it immediately, and the immediacy is the reason it works.

If two things qualify, take the smaller one. A post beats a house.

And if you’re stuck between two, take the one you were going to walk past faster.

One. Pick one thing on your route that you have decided about. Not a person. A thing. A tree, a post, a house, a bend in the road.

You already know which one. That is how you know.

Two. Walk up to it and look at it and say out loud, in plain words, what you want from it.

That is the sentence. Not the polite version. The plain one, the one you would be embarrassed to say to a person.

If nobody is near, say it at the volume you would use if somebody were near. It works either way, and I have done this on a county road with a car coming and I can tell you it works.

Three. Then stand there for one whole minute and don’t ask it for anything.

One minute. That is the hard part. That minute is where the wanting shows up, because you’ll get to about ten seconds and then you’ll want to leave.

Do not fight it. Just let it come, and then let it be there, and stay for the other fifty seconds.

That is the whole practice. Ten minutes, one sentence, one minute of standing.

Now, because I’m extremely good at talking myself out of things like this, here’s what to do when it goes wrong.

If you can’t say the sentence. That is common and it is not a failure.

Say the first four words even if the rest doesn’t come. Everybody starts the same way, and I have started every one of mine with the word obviously and then not known what I meant.

If your voice won’t do it at all, write it on your hand and read it off. That counts. Nobody can check.

If the minute goes badly. This is the common one. You will get about ten seconds in and then your own day will arrive, uninvited.

You will be at your desk, or in your car, or in a conversation from last week.

That isn’t failure either. That is the minute doing its job.

Let the day come. Do not push it away, because pushing it away is more work, and then look back at the thing after it has gone.

If you want a smaller version and the full one is too much, make the minute twenty seconds.

Twenty honest seconds beats four minutes of standing there gritting your teeth.

A way to know it happened, so it is not a mood. You said a sentence out loud that you wouldn’t have said. That is the thing that happened. If you’re embarrassed about it later, it worked.

And the part that’s actually the exercise.

While you’re standing there, you’ll notice the want isn’t one thing.

It will be three or four things, one after another, and they won’t be the same size.

The first one is the big obvious one, and it’s the one you came prepared for.

Then there’s a second one underneath it that’s much smaller and much more embarrassing, and it usually arrives about forty seconds in.

And then there’s a third one that’s not about the tree at all. That one is about something else entirely, and I’m not going to guess what, because it’s yours.

That isn’t me being clever. That is just what happens when you stop moving.

One instruction, since it’s the only one that matters. When you say the sentence out loud, say it to the thing and not to yourself.

That is a small physical difference and it’s the whole difference.

And when you get back to the door, don’t write it down and don’t tell anybody how it went.

Not because it’s profound. Because the telling is where it goes to die. You will say the clean version at the kitchen table and the interesting part will get edited out on the way.

Just leave it in your body and go and do whatever you were doing.

If you skip it, you have got fifty minutes of a man talking to a dirt road, which isn’t nothing.

One more thing, and you don’t have to do it.

If you want to go further with this, there’s a week version.

One thing a day, decided in advance, and you don’t get to pick which one once you’re standing there. You pick the tree before you start walking.

Seven days. Same three steps. The sentence out loud, then the minute.

Keep them on a scrap by the door. Not on a phone. A phone is fine but you’ll see the time on it and then you’ll be doing it for the wrong reason.

And don’t do them all in one place. Change the route.

That is completely optional, and I’d like you to do it, and those two things are both true.

It works on the walk to the mailbox. It has nothing to do with ridges. I promise you that.

The day it doesn’t work is the day you notice you have started picking the easy thing.

Then go back and do a hard one.

That is the only trick I’ve got and I don’t know where I picked it up.

Go on then. The light is doing something on the trail and Bo has already given up on me.

I have not solved it. I have stopped keeping score. That will do.