Shedding

A eucalyptus, shedding its bark, takes a season to renew itself.

A eucalyptus, shedding its bark, takes a season to renew itself. It might peel away all at once, but it doesn’t. The tree inside this skin grows, causing the bark to crack, and then the tree begins the long process of letting go, of releasing what was useful last year, but this year, doesn’t quite fit its new needs.

When I was young, behind the housing track where we lived when I was thirteen, there was an orange grove. Along the edge of the grove a row of eucalyptus stood guard against the Santa Ana winds that would rage down along the side of the foothills. Whoever owned the grove had long since lost interest in it and its warriors protecting it from the wind. My younger sister and I would walk there on weekends and gather planks of bark that trees cast aside, no longer needed, and we took them home. We wrote quotes and messages and kind thoughts and drew what we could into the bark, on the side that had been closest to the tree. Then with clear nail polish bought with our scavenged dimes and quarters, we sealed it one tiny stroke at a time. What was cast off from the tree became something new to us.

This was a process no one had to teach us because we lived it. We had learned to release ourselves from one home after another annually. Along the way, different people made of us what they would and we learned to do the same, to scavenge what was shed, cast adrift in the wind, and make something of it.

I had forgotten this until sorting through a folder of images and I found a series of photos of eucalyptus, each shedding its bark. I wondered why had this so fascinated me. This morning I remembered: the reused, renewed, recombinant lives we lived. We understood change. And as I reflect on that time, I remember letting go and letting go again, letting go of one thing, of many things, at times, of everything.

I have traveled far since then and changed greatly along the way. Having nested myself into one place for the last twenty-five years, I now understand home and community and stability. What I have forgotten is change, continuous change. Over the last months amind all these unnatural changes in our society, I’ve started several changes in my life only to set them aside, thinking I would get back to it in the morning. Now I can see that those were good steps, planning the changes. Now I realize, remember actually, that change is a slow process. Just as the eucalyptus had to grow into its new skin to release last year’s cloak, I cannot just cast aside the old instantly. Now I must grow into the new before I can release what is no longer useful, that which no longer fits the life I will live now in this world.

It’s a messy process, but becoming what this new way of living is bringing me is a good thing. I’ll clean up as I go—and as I let go.