The Oak Papers by James Canton

Author:James Canton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.

Today, once more, I read Buber on the true observation of trees and then spend an hour and more contemplating that oak in the field behind my cottage to which I am ever drawn these days. I sit and focus on the form of that oak. I only realise some time later that what I am doing is a form of meditative practice. The focus on the oak allows me to still the frantic thoughts in my head. I sit and transfer my concentration to the oak. I consider all that made the oak an individual. I see the shape and structure of the bare branches of the oak. I see the darkness of a tear in the bark. I see a golden oak leaf that still clings to the tree.

And after time being by that oak tree in the field, I feel so much calmer. I rise and walk away along the country lanes to the south before heading west to watch the light of the day fading to night.

An hour on, and I notice now how the waxing moon has grown more full, more gibbous, since the afternoon. In this deep dusk, silence seems to sit so easily. It will lie more solidly still in the night, but for now I feel the land gently sinking into silence as the dusk birdsong fades away. It seems an age since I have sat in moonlight. The Field Oak is iron black. The wire branches are crazed and chaotic before the open spread of stars filling the firmament. It is not so cold. The wind has lessened. Layers of cloth hold the night’s air from my skin. My hands are warm though bare. A certain cold pinch to my nose is all I can feel of this winter’s night; a touch, nothing more. It is the quiet of night that I feel most heavily upon me and on the lands about as they settle towards sleep.

It is a clear night and when I shut the torchlight off, I see how the moonlight has grown brighter. The oak trunk is now lit with a leaden, silver sheen that is broken by the black shadows of branches caught in the metallic light. I go in from the field. By the break in the hedge before the green lane, I turn back and see the oak cast in a mercurial blanket, and as I reach the back door of the cottage, I realise it is a lunar shawl, pale as death, that covers the lower body of the oak.

19 February

It can take many years of being in a place before we are finally able to see what there is to see.

Gary Snyder – the poet and environmental thinker – writes in A Place in Space (1995) of walking past an old oak for twenty years before one day he ‘actually paid attention’ to that specific oak and ‘felt its oldness, suchness, inwardness, oakness, as if it were my own’. It is a moment of revelation and of intimacy.

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