I bought my wife a weeping willow for her birthday shortly after we were married, and planted the three-foot sapling in the middle of our front yard, between the front porch and the main sidewalk. It became apparent almost immediately that my choice of location was a horrible mistake. The particular variety that I purchased can grow up to six feet in a single season, topping out at over fifty feet tall. Weeping willows are relatively “fat” trees as well, with a dripline diameter roughly equal to their height. My feeble attempts to keep the tree in check through pruning only seemed to make it grow faster, and it quickly overwhelmed our small front yard, pushing its way up and over the porch roof, and merging with the basswood and linden trees in the parking strip, shading the sidewalk beneath a dark arboreal tunnel that forced the neighbor kids to duck low as they rode through on their bicycles. One evening, and for no reason other than spontaneous impulse, I took a chainsaw and cut the tree down.
For years afterward, the residual roots would send up shoots that had to be periodically hacked into submission. One spring, I planted a cutting from one of these volunteer shoots out by the river at the far end of the back yard, a spot where it could spread out and express its true nature—where I probably should have planted the tree in the first place. The cutting grew fast. Extremely fast. A decade later, when we were forced by circumstance to move to a different state, the tree was well on its way to its fifty-foot height expectancy, and had assumed the iconic weeping willow shape, with a broad umbrella of limbs and branches draped with leafy stems cascading to the ground.
When we moved, I couldn’t bear to leave the tree behind. It was originally a gift to my wife, after all. So, I rooted a few cuttings and packed them into large pots, and wedged them into the back of the U-Haul. Now, two years later, one of those cuttings sits in front of me as I write this, a healthy but awkward spider of willow switches splayed in the sun on the deck of our second-floor apartment, waiting patiently for the day when it can cast a broad wispy shadow across some future backyard.
There is something strange in this. When I look at the tree in the pot on my deck, I can’t help but see it as the same tree that I planted twenty years ago. Not a piece or a part of the same tree, not a permutation or the generational offspring of the same tree, but the original tree itself. The tree that I chopped down and the tree that I planted in the back yard—the tree that likely still stands there—and the tree in the pot on my deck, despite the fact that they occupy different physical spaces and different—some overlapping—moments in time, are all one in the same organic manifestation, one in the same being, one in the same tree.
Such a thing seems ridiculous from an analytical perspective, from the perspective of clear-headed material objectivity that holds that the world is populated with independent entities and objects separated with borders and boundaries from other independent entities and objects. But I can’t shake the perception. It is too fundamental, too primal, too deeply rooted, as it were. And it is a perception, immediate and present, not an afterthought or a product of reflection, not something superadded after the fact. It is on par with, and as unshakable as, my experience of my arms as extensions of my own body. When I look at the tree in the pot, I see it in my mind’s eye extending across time and space in a way that fuses the multiple, historically separate plants into a single willow tree, one tree in multiple places, one tree emerging in memory as multiple forms, multiple faces of the same living being.
This reminds me of something I read once about an indigenous perspective regarding animals, in which the deer killed today is the same deer that was killed yesterday—although they are unique, distinct, and separate occurrences, they are both identical manifestations of the same, unitary deer-being. My experience of the tree is something like that: a strong sense of a primal unity expressing itself in superficial multiplicity, a single tree-process stretching across time and space, capable of taking on a multitude of transient local forms.
