The places that hold us when everything is changing
Award-winning poets offered their work at the Morton Arboretum last month. It moved me, though not for the reason you might guess. Many of us have wandered the Arboretum’s paths, only to be transfixed by the lone bright red maple on an east side hilltop or watched a heron lift from Lake Marmo. Four simple words showed me how much of my life has taken root there.
“Here at the Morton.” The words slip from the emcee’s tongue again and again as he stands at the podium, introducing each poet. Around me, fifty listeners sit in silence. A large movie screen covers the window, showing only someone’s computer desktop. No one uses it. We listen to poems about nature while the bright October sky stays hidden behind it. All of a sudden, our beloved Arboretum feels like someone else’s place, somewhere I visit rather than somewhere I belong. He speaks the name easily. Here at the Morton. Words that strike my heart. It is as if someone had called my dearest friend by a name I didn’t recognize, or renamed my hometown.
Don first brought me here on one of our early dates. That was some sixty-six years ago. We have continued to walk here ever since. These paths carried our running group, which aged into a walking group. We met here three times a week for thirty years, until one of us died and the group faded like coneflowers in autumn.
Now we often share these paths with our much younger friend Maria. Her age lets me believe we will always have someone to walk beside. We pass beneath trees that have held both my grief and my joy. Clients and friends have joined me here in their hardest seasons: a woman who didn’t want to go on living, and another grieving what cancer took. Joy has been present on cold winter nights at Illumination, as my family and I sipped hot chocolate, laughed, and sighed in awe as twinkling lights and music made the branches dance like ballerinas.
Magic lives in these lakes and in these roots. Magic slides along an April breeze that meets my skin on a spring morning to say Mother Earth has not forgotten to return her Virginia bluebells to the glen near parking lot 13.
Here, in the place of pets’ ashes, and likely a few humans too, we are swallowed into the cycles of nature. Here we learn give and take, death and rebirth. Here the right amount of fire returns the prairie to itself, and like the phoenix it rises to delight us with Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod, and tall grasses.
We, too, are reborn in nature’s reassuring patterns. Here I find what is so often missing for me: silence, and an embrace that asks for so little in return. It is a classroom, a lovers’ secret spot, a holy place for healing, for remembering who we are at our core.
I want to ask the man at the podium if he knows the Arboretum the way I do. She is alive.
I do not ask. Halfway through the readings, I rise from my seat in the front row and walk out, meeting no one’s eyes, thanking the woman at the door. I am too tender to stay. And I am torn, because I love poets, their willingness to search for the right words and their courage to share their experience.
Many things are changing in my life these days. Don and I are downsizing, moving from our home of thirty-three years to a new town. There are parts of this world I no longer recognize. Others might not respond so emotionally to “Here at the Morton.” But for me, it was another unwelcome change.
What surprised me about this encounter is how clearly it revealed the role the Arboretum has played in my life. This place has been a continuous thread, weaving its way through all my seasons. Through every change, it has soothed me and taught me its rhythms: how things disappear and return.
Here, on the ancestral home of the Three Fires people, the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, each of us may find a different way to belong to this land.
Names help us find our way and share what we love with others. But an unfamiliar name can make even the most familiar place feel far away. Names hold our experience. Each time we speak or write them, another memory, another moment of meaning, is gathered into them. When I read this to Don, he said simply, “We just call it the Arboretum.”
What helps you stay rooted when so much around you is changing?
Photo Credits for images of Don and me: Maria Basualdo