Saxifrage 37

Vitality|A LLISON L ANSVERK with the tree’s cadence. My inner ear, a place touched only by secrets, hummed softly.

My reveries ended as my neck tingled from a presence I felt behind me.

Warily I glanced up and around to see who had chanced upon us. Standing erect like sentries, the real living trees stood vigil for their fallen comrade. But their watchful poise was confined to the edge of the forest. None of them had pushed the boundary of their flank to throw themselves on their companion. None of them had rushed to check for a pulse that they did not have. But, though unlike my tree they gave no audible assertion of vitality, they were alive. So why was I not wrapping my arms around one of them in an attempt to experience a life force? Why was I pining for something less tangible? Why was I embracing a metaphor of vitality, a metaphor of a living tree when I was surrounded by a whole forest?

I gripped the bark beneath my fingers, no longer warm like the brush of skin.

Isn’t this what it always comes down to for me? I am forever being harassed on one side by scientific knowledge and the other by metaphors. A constant war rages on in my mind. An internal battle between science and imagination: a regiment of facts and figures on one side facing off with a brigade of pink dragons. Whenever I tell people that I am a double major in biology and creative nonfiction writing I get the “oh that’s an interesting combination,” to which I inevitably reply, “I like to balance the two sides of my brain.” But really, what if the fact that I can’t ever give control over to one side or the other prevents me from being in equilibrium? Both sides pull on the reigns in my head, and everyone who has seen wild horses knows that no one wants to be tied between two going opposite ways.

And so to stop my brain from fissuring I wrapped my arms tightly around the trunk to anchor myself. Because the scaly bark that nipped at my knee caps and the pulse that knocked against my chin hailed to both science and metaphor. It was something in the middle, something that balanced tenuously on the equator between the two poles of my brain. Scientific knowledge and imagination pushed in on either side—detrivores assisting in the decomposition of the longitudinal fissure that separated the two hemispheres of my brain. In my mind’s eye, the deep groove of the fissure, which had the scaly contours of my tree, opened as the two sides merged and synapses sparked in greeting. Clearly there is elegance and truth in the combination of science and metaphor. Sometimes I find myself working too hard to figure out which side of my brain deserves more attention, when really it’s enough to give into the synaptic firings and musings of both. And so once again I released my tensed lungs and my breath rushed out with the tree’s. There was still tension, but the taut fibers in my mind allowed for fathomless chords of music. It was enough to lie hugging the tree and let sap and blood, bark and skin, science and metaphor fuse as the two sides of my hyphaed brain entwined in an electrical embrace.

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