read to the trees

for my children

to my children,

in the backyard of my childhood home there is a pile of rocks in the middle of a patch of garden. Over the years it’s been built around, and now your grandparents have planted raspberry cane to spring wild around it and feed the birds and the chipmunks (and perhaps themselves, if they are lucky). But when I was your age, I used to think that these rocks were incandescent with possibility. They were nothing but blank canvases: a pirate ship, a house in the woods, a school. I built worlds there, clambering up and down them, and somehow I can always remember the way that one of them, if you look at it just right, looks a bit like a humpback whale.

Now that you are in school, your days are measured differently. You move in a sea, or a swarm, of others, you share secrets and giggles, you kick soccer balls, you run the mile as fast as you can. And as you move through the rhythm of the day you might find a little current that seems to say, you should be… and fills in blanks. Sometimes it’s in how the teachers tell you to sit or stand or sing. Sometimes it’s in spelling tests with check marks or math problem sets with stars. Sometimes it’s laced into your own minds - someone else already reads chapter books and someone else won the award for honesty.

This little current I cannot erase for you. I don’t know if I would want to, but I know that I can’t. My hope, here, and now, is to pluck from that sea and swarm of messages, all bright and beautiful and troublesome held together, a thread for you to tie around your wrist -

the world is not impatient with you.

The rocks in my parent’s backyard did not mind how long it took me to read or do multiplication or run a mile, they did not mind if my stories were stumbling or slow to begin. I like to think, in fact, that they were my first and best listeners, welcomers of a new story however many hundreds of years after they were first formed.

Tell your truths to the trees, tell the red tailed hawks and the chickadees - let them fly your hopes back to nest and to far-flung treetop. In this backyard I took my time telling stories on the humpback whale shaped rock. In our backyard, my loves, take your time telling stories to our tree stumps and our ivy crawling up the edges of our fences. Take your time creating the country of Unicornia or setting sail to the edge of the world. Play chase without wondering if you run fast enough. Play hide and seek without worrying how long it takes for someone to find you. Read the clouds, read the wind. The world will give its words at the acceptable time.

For a long time I worried that all I was, or ever could be, was the list of numbers and letters that follow us throughout the rhythms of school, the achievements and the should be’s. And then for a time I worried that I would not be able to do anything to keep that from you, or that I could not be a good mother if I didn’t keep you safe from it all.

Now, I still worry sometimes, but I know that what I must do - all I can do, is hold up this thread in the tapestry of your life.

With us, you can take your time. With us, you can grow as gently and slowly and as fiercely and rapidly as you need to, day by day, season by season. You can read the clouds before you read books, you can tell stories to trees before you run a mile, you can race each other and never know who won.

Tie this thread around your wrist: we love you, we love you, we love you.

Grow gently.