Rest.

I have a confession to make. 

I talk to trees. 

In fairness, if my confession were just that it wouldn’t be noteworthy. I imagine a lot of us have chats with trees, as well we should: they’re great listeners (far better than most humans, frankly), they hold grief well and help us breathe more freely - all marks of good friends. Plus, there is nothing terribly surprising about a human talking to an inanimate object. If you’ve ever owned a Roomba, you get it.

So I suppose my real confession is, they answer me. 

On days when I have felt down, lost, and confused - more days than I care to admit - I trudge myself uphill to either Prospect Park or Green-Wood Cemetery and ask the trees if they have any advice for me. They always tell me the same thing:

Take your glasses off. 

For years now they've been telling me to do the same thing. Every now and then they add a little bit to the suggestion, mostly encouragement: 

You're doing okay. 

Just keep going. 

You're here. 

They tell me I'm here a lot. But consistently they just keep telling me to take my glasses off. 

So I do what they tell me and I take my glasses off and I try to understand what they're getting at. If you are myopic and have never taken your glasses off in a forest, I do highly recommend it. It makes me sad for people who aren't nearsighted: you may never know the particularly beautiful, pixelated, glintingly undefined splendor that appears. Like Annie Dillard’s tree with the lights in it¹ - a passage of writing which I encountered as a teenager and which has never left my side - the world becomes a constellation of tiny flames. 

It’s a wonderful experience of mindfulness, but it’s never quite seemed to be what the trees are getting at. So I start to analyze: is it that my depth perception changes? That positionality becomes a function of light rather than perceived parallax? Is it that color and contrast get to overtake shape and human linguistic labeling? But none of these thoughts have felt like the point they’re trying to get at. 

After years of this, the other day I finally asked them: is it just so that my eyes can rest?

And I burst into tears. 

I find when I suddenly burst into tears I’ve hit on something resonant - Lynne’s Truth Machine, my therapist used to call it. 

Yes, they said. Rest.

What they actually said was “Seek refuge from the rectangles,” but honestly I felt like the alliteration was a bit too on the nose. No offense, trees. But also, point taken. I struggle with New York City and its endless expanse of 90 degree angles. I don’t think we evolved to be surrounded by the regularity of our straight-lined shape-making. I believe we need organic forms and imperfect lines in order to feel whole, to feel at peace, and the forest offers us that. 

Additionally, even when I have the right prescription (which I very much do not currently have) my vision is impaired in such a way that I am probably always imperceptibly squinting. But when I remove my corrective lenses, my eyes finally get to completely relax, because they know they don’t stand a chance at focus. They rest. 

So I walked for a while through the woods, surrounded by the trees with the lights in them, and pondered rest. 

Of course, ultimately when I’m talking to the trees I’m talking to myself; seeking counsel from the tiniest, quietest voice inside. And rest has been on my mind. I’ve caught myself more than once saying in therapy, “I’m so tired.” And though I can hear it emerge from a place that feels young and long-suffering, I have a hard time not judging the voice from my current point of view - I think my life is more easeful than probably 90% of the world’s population, what right do I have to be tired? But clearly there is something within me that needs to be given permission to rest. 

This morning I finished reading my journal from the summer of 2002, the summer I wrote about in Newman Street. It was an effort to try to jog some memories of the time, and cut through the dissociative state I was in. Though I had a few laughs, generally speaking it was a hard read. 

At a few points in the journal I write to my future self:

August 18, 2002: “Where is my life going!?! I’m gonna close my eyes and be 40. Oh weird. OK, very future Lynne, what do you think about THAT? Your naive 21 year old [self] musing of just 19 years from now. Oh god so weird. Did time fly like you’re sure it will now?”

I never finished the journal, so there are a handful of empty pages at the end. In this spirit of talking to myself, through time and space, the trees and I decided to write back:

September 15, 2024: “...Rest, sweet girl. I have to ask you to rest. I got emotional when I wrote that. We struggle with rest in general, but I think maybe you need to rest specifically. This girl in her Teetering Years, broken physically by loss and fear. You can rest. I can hold you in your form, cradle you and all the pain you were in, and let you sleep. If you can sleep, perhaps I will feel less tired, less overwhelmed… You needed to be tended to, held and rocked, and in this summer you didn’t have what you needed. You had bits of it, but not enough. May I offer you the balance of what was owed... May I fill up the emptiness as an adult, as someone who can take care of both of us. 

I love you, I love you, I love you.

Rest.

1. Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974 , 35.