The Backyard of Misfit Trees

I’ve got a backyard of misfit trees. They were planted decades ago and left to their own devices. These trees include a plum tree with a spaghetti tentacle crown, a leaning apple tree -- which I’m pretty sure should never have been allowed to get as tall as it is -- and a cherry tree that’s also growing out of the ground at about 80 degrees.

The backyard’s creator was who-knows-how-many past owners ago, so there’s no way of knowing if the backyard’s current state matches the original vision. But when I first saw it I thought, whatever was planned, this probably wasn’t it. Everybody knows that all you need to do is brace the tree when it’s yonger and it will grow straight. At least everybody knows who heard a talk by Mormon President Gordon Hinkly called, Bring Up a Child in the Way He Should Go in the 1993 General Conference, like I did when I was ten years old. In his talk, Hinckley describes planting a sapling in his backyard and then all but forgetting about it until one day he notices that the tree is growing crooked. What happened next, he says, is “I went out and braced myself against it as if to push it upright. But the trunk was now nearly a foot in diameter. My strength was as nothing against it.” So he takes some aggressive action, using a pulley to wrench it in the direction he wanted it to go and then sawing off a large limb on one side. He then reports that after fifty years the tree has become an asset to the home. But to get there he reflects, “how serious was the trauma of its youth and how brutal the treatment I used to straighten it.” The metaphor was clear: Getting a tree, or a person, to grow straight when it is young hardly takes any effort. But if you let it just go, it will be much harder to coerce it later on. Hinkly continues: “I have seen a similar thing, many times, in children whose lives I have observed. The parents who brought them into the world seem almost to have abdicated their responsibility. The results have been tragic. A few simple anchors would have given them the strength to withstand the forces that have shaped their lives. Now it appears it is too late.”

What ten-year-old-me heard was this: “There is no escape. You will do it or we will make it brutal -- one way or another everyone will grow straight. Straight trees are the best. And why wouldn’t you want to be a straight and pretty tree? Don’t you want to be an asset to those around you? Do you really want to someday say to yourself, “Oh No, it’s too late!” Of course you don’t. See, those ties around you are for your good. You’ll thank us in the end.” 

So it’s no surprise that while looking at my seemingly miscreant backyard trees for the first time after buying my house, Hinkley’s voice came out of the recesses of my brain: “Now it appears it is too late.” I was seeing the trees with the same mindset as my ten-year-old-self along with that kind of keen certainty that is so easily mistaken for truth. Someone had abdicated their responsibility and now I was stuck with the consequences. 

It took a personal existential crisis before I could understand the real reason for my tree's insubordination and it wasn’t because the trees were bad trees. Like so many massive truths that go unseen, a huge blot-out-the-sun-sequoia tree resides in my neighbor’s backyard, blanketing a huge swath of my backyard in shadow every afternoon. The trees weren’t being rebellious; the trees knew what they needed and did what they had to in order to meet their needs. This insight brought another: These trees in my backyard are beautiful.

I was a young tree once. I was tied to stakes at an age young enough that some flimsy fucking string was all it took. As time went on, to no one’s surprise, including mine, I grew straight. Eventually no ties were needed and I grew straight right on my own. It helped that along the way every crooked tree within my sight was painstakingly pointed out and judged as a cautionary tale if I ever thought of diverting from my path. As a young tree it never occurred to me that I was missing out on the sunshine. I mean, every once in a while it would kinda suck, but look how straight! Have you seen those crooked trees? I don’t even need the string anymore. 

Shortly after moving to Oregon and buying the house with the crooked trees the mental breakdown caught up to me. I entered a Portland sky-grey depression. Something was missing and yet that couldn’t be possible. Since birth I had been studying the checkboxes required to be happy and not a single one was left unchecked. Rather than taking in the sights from the top of my hard earned perch of external accomplishments, I couldn’t see anything. Nothing for miles and miles and miles.

Then one of those checkboxes, my wife, started leaning into the sun. She grew. She took me by the hand and said, you need to feel this. It’s called the sun. Then the sun touched the tips of my leaves and then the twigs and then a whole branch. It was then I realized there was such a thing as a shadow and that I had been living underneath it. I learned that the reasons I was tied down were arbitrary reasons. Someone’s made up version of what a beautiful tree is. Growth ensued. And with it, terrifying clarity. The checkboxes were revealed for what they were and the meaning my ego derived from them needed to be let go. 

I’m a little more crooked now and happily growing more crooked every day. When it gets hard I look at the beautiful sun that I’m standing in and remember that I’m growing.

Ram Dass:  “When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”