Two of my magnolia tree’s lumpy roots have rows of leaves on them. They are the magnolia’s leaves, this magnolia’s, the one whose branches have reached out so far they’ve found the ground and re-rooted, and I gathered them down among these roots. It is not my tree only: I found my way underneath along a narrow trodden path from the sidewalk through ivy. Ten feet from the quad, a small domed jungle: go in underneath the branches and their leaves, which are glossy like green patent leather shoes, and alive.
I have only spent a few hours inside the magnolia this fall, but it feels like longer, because this is the place where I remember my soul. I eat lunches here, sitting on the humped anaconda-backs of the roots, or I climb up on the wide lower branches. Even soaked in Off, I get eaten by small creatures whose names I do not know. I gather leaves here, from between the ivy on the ground keeping an eye out especially for the weathered ones that have hardened into a sheen like enamel. These are thinner than the living or recently fallen leaves; they are strong and brittle. Most of them are pale, the color of raw leather, with a pearlescent sheen. But a few have kept some of their chlorophyll, or found a new kind of green. This is nothing like the fierce dark of the living leaves; it is the color of oxidized copper, the color of horse-and-rider statues in cobblestoned city squares. The leaves have not been fired in a kiln, but the seasons have fired them, and their color is unpredictable like the ceramics glaze called “celadon,” which sometimes comes out a mixture of green anywhere from seafoam to jade, and other times ashy gold.
I have never climbed trees in a skirt before but I do here, because no one but me seems to come here but me, and the one time a young photography student walked in, crouched and earnest, she did not seem to notice me, balanced directly above her head. Up in the branches I can see out toward the chapel, and across the quad, and feel breezes that don’t reach into the earthbound layer of air I normally breathe. I read theology here, and sometimes I pray – or maybe I pray here, and sometimes I read theology.
I am an embodied soul here, an ensouled body, and it is all right that I barely know what that means, because the tree does not ask; it just is. I sit on the branches whose bark has been worn (not glossy and smooth, but worn a little: the bark has light spots on it where protruding bits have been broken off by the bones and flesh of other human behinds). I pin handouts through their hole-punches to a twig when I’m not reading them, and I learn to trust my feet and legs and balance, climbing up one-handed as often as not, with a book clamped under one elbow or held between my teeth. I cantilever myself on the branch, one leg stretched out to a lower limb, one pulled up to my chest, with an elbow resting on pulled-up knee, propping the hand that holds my reading. It is always a precarious equilibrium; this tree does not fit me well enough to fall asleep safely. I have to move every so often because parts of me go pins and needles.
The magnolia is teaching me solitude, but also hospitality: what it means to say welcome to another ensouled body. Hospitality in this way has everything and nothing to do with hostessing. It has nothing to do with an antiseptically clean house or with hovering at a guest’s elbows, obsessively refilling her coffee cup; it has everything to do with knowing my own space, spiritually and emotionally and mentally and physically, and making ready, in that space, to turn toward invited and uninvited visitors with honest attention. Hospitality is about me and it is not about me: I have not seen a person at all if the main question in my mind is about the impression I have made, about whether and how he will judge me; and yet I cannot see another person unless I am willing to be a person, a flicker of body-soul, a needy scrap of glory.