tree

What usually happens, during acupuncture, is I drift off into a place that’s a little better than sleep, because there’s a certain amount of awareness.

I’m sure it’s planned that way. I’m on a comfy massage table, pillows propped just so. Tiny needles, placed to energize the right meridians are twangling painlessly in my dermis. The lights are dimmed, and fairyland music plays softly while a hint of fragrant oils infuses the room. So, once the thoughts of the moment play their way through my frontal cortex, some other brain zone takes over, filling my head with nondescript imagery...sometimes like a subtle form of the Northern Lights.

On Wednesday morning, after asking Sara to work on my Achilles tendinitis, I had a vision of a very large tree. It was an evergreen, conical like a Christmas tree, but with rounded contours and softer cypress needles...and huge. It towered, many stories high, at the crest of a hill up which I’d hiked.

The tree was not perfect. Somewhere, at a point roughly two-thirds of its height, the trunk had diverged into two. The trunk section facing me was bare. Devoid of  branches and foliage, it was nubbed off at the top, and polished smooth with age. Patches of its bareness showed through the tree at many elevations. Behind it, the second trunk was full of branches, and it extended them lushly as if embracing the brittle, empty trunk next to it, giving the tree--though asymmetrically patchy--an overall effect of wholeness.