When The Trees Say Nothing

and what you write is a strange foreshadowing

Have you ever had a panic attack in an exercise class? Welcome to my past Friday.

As I wrapped up my sticky thoughts post and scheduled it to send it out later, I shut my computer and headed off to a 'cardio core' dance workout class I had rather optimistically booked earlier that week.

I was running late, so I threw a light bag over my shoulder, tossed in my wallet, keys, phone, and headed out, sprinting through my neighborhood where hanging vines lined the walls, and drills punctured the ground like warlords.

I’ve always been very sensitive to sound, people know me to jump over noises others could overlook. I squirm and screw my face up into strange contortions when a frequency reaches a point beyond my comprehension. Maybe, as a singer, I am so used to embodying sound myself that when I hear things that feel so displeasing to the ear, I cant help but have a visceral reaction to them.

Either way, Nadi (my Shiba Inu dog) is exactly the same. Though calm inside the house, she is absolutely terrified of buses on the street with all their obnoxious sounds and explosive brakes. She’ll pull so hard on the leash when she’s scared, determined to run away from the offending sound. I know what she wants. She wants to get somewhere contained, where she understands what is around her and feels a sense of agency in the situation…

I could not agree more.

Halfway through reaching my destination, I realize I've forgotten my asthma inhaler.

I can already feel my chest wheezing, and if the cardio class is anything like last time, I thought to myself, then I'll definitely need my inhaler during class, not to mention for the run over there. By this point, I was closer to the pharmacy than I was to the house. I had a prescription waiting for me there, maybe if I run in really fast I can grab the inhaler and make it to class just in time?

The kind man behind the counter hands it to me, runs my card like a guillotine through the machine and I sprint out of there with the inhaler in hand. Now it's crunch time. I speed past the slowly opening shops as I rip off the packaging and throw it in a nearby trash can. I put the inhaler in my bag.

I am running so fast that I'm startling people as they walk. They move aside like ducks in the wake of a speeding boat. I should be going slower but I hate the thought of being late to class after all the kerfuffle of getting there. I finally arrive and rush down the stairs to the sounds of throbbing bass and emerging pink disco lights. Someone is shouting in an enthusiastic, slightly sexual, androgynous voice, ‘Let’s go team! Time to get your heart rate up!’ (it was plenty up thank you very much).

The teacher begins to instruct the first round of choreography while I throw my bag down by the mirror and search for my inhaler. I had just had it so it’s got to be easily accessible. In a flustered state, I empty the bag’s contents on the ground (Cardi B slamming in my ears) and move my hands across everything inside the bag feeling for the white plastic life-saver. I begin to get extremely unsettled, this makes absolutely no sense, where in the world is my inhaler? I just had it. I literally just had it.

My credit card swishes across the dance floor, the ibuprofen I’d packed in the zip compartment is rolling toward some girls foot as she demolishes the choreography like a pro… What am I doing here anyway? Who am I kidding? I begin to realize that the experience of this place is making me descend into a panic state and it’s time to leave before something in me breaks. Ah yes, the ol breaking point. Being on the verge of breaking is an awful hovering place to chill. You can’t chill. It’s a no-chill zone. 

Everything is shouting and screaming all at once.
Everything is shouting and screaming all at once.

I’m crying at this point. It’s embarrassing. Losing things brings up a lot for me. All my life I have been a serial loser of things. I lose things a lot. I work tirelessly to put important things in special places and forget what the special places are. I have lost passports, jewelry, computer hard drives (I know, don’t ask), clothes, notebooks, medicine…. which is why this one cut me so much. I know how important it is to keep my medicines safe, heck, what if I had an actual asthma attack? Lord knows I was gearing myself up for one with all this panic and stress. The thought of not having it was giving me a lot of anxiety. 

In fact, I never go on stage without my inhaler. It sits down by the mic stand or with one of my band members. I’ve rarely needed it, maybe a couple of times. But I like to know it’s there, in case. A lot can be said for psychological security.

Photos by Julia Drummond, Webster Hall

I’m now traipsing through the streets of New York mumbling insults to myself. How could I be so careless with the one thing I really needed to hang onto? Where in the world could it be? Nothing has ever fallen out of this bag before and I have never just accidentally dropped something out of the steel grip of my hand while running? It seems completely absurd? Is God playing a cruel joke on me? 

I felt like I was in a game of Jumanji. Upon writing about sticky thoughts I had been launched into my own pool of treacle, slipping all over the ground of my tortured psyche. The self-loathing was surmounting and I was becoming more and more panicked, while the drills kept pounding in my periphery. 

If an alien were to come to New York city, might they not assume we’re at war? These huge pieces of machinery pummeling at the earth? Cranes in the sky hauling massive concrete slabs onto high rise structures, might it not look like complete destruction to the outside eye? We call it ‘building’ but I imagine it could also look like annihilation. Just the sound alone! To think that we walk through all this cacophony and manage to compartmentalize it as ‘sounds of the city’.  It’s a marvel how adaptive the human being is. Some of us now can’t even sleep without white noise apps on our phone. Is that in some way, completely insane? Considering, white noise is a type of sound containing equal energy at all frequencies within a specific range. A blanket of stimulation intended to make us relax. I fear we may have forgotten what silence really sounds like here in the city. It’s perhaps why I have been writing about it so much over here. I hunger for it more than ever in my life.

As I walked down the streets crammed with construction, I reflected on what I had just written that morning. ‘Welcome in each thought, nasty or self-aggrandizing, welcome them all in with a smile saying, I see you there, you are welcome here.’

I was desperate to slow down and get my breathing more consistent. I had tried to call a friend to get support but there was no answer. I had to employ a new plan.

And so, I began

Hello shame, I see you there

Hello disappointment in myself for losing something so crucial to my health, you are welcome here

Hello regret at not slowing down, I see you there

Hello rage, you are welcome here

Hello sadness over the fact that I’ve always been this kid, losing everything back in school, I see you there

Hello memories of my underwear getting lost at school camp, then being found and identified by the teacher due to my mothers caring handwritten ‘Kimbra’ on the tag, I see you there

Hello surge of embarrassment at school assembly when I was notified of this publicly and all the kids laughed at me, I see you there

Hello utter confusion at the complete absurdity of having the inhaler in my hand one minute then it disappearing the next, I see you there

Hello feelings of hopelessness that as much as I try to make sense of the world and succeed for a moment, something will inevitably come along and hurl it back into completely obscurity again, you are welcome here

I said these all out loud. Yes, I must have looked nuts. I took that risk. As I’ve spoken about before here, I like how ignored I feel in New York. Everyone’s seen it all at some point. It actually sets you free to imagine that someone just thinks you’re crazy. If they think you’re crazy they’ll avert their eyes and pay no attention to you. Just how I like it.

At this point, I had been searching the streets to no avail and I was completely overwhelmed and desperate to get the hell away from the endless stimulation and sound. I began to walk in the direction of my apartment, tears still streaming down my face while I kept my head down, trying to breathe (a function of mine that was already impaired, of course).

I walked past a restaurant I recognized and quickly remembered why I like it so much. The food is a bit average to be honest, but the tree outside. Oh, the tree outside. It is simply something else. Majestic and hovering above the flurry of human whim. She’s regal, yes, loving and generous, her trunk extending out over the street, you have to duck a little to get under her. There is a gathering in the middle of the trunk, where huge thick branches reach out from. Three or four arms of the tree find a joining here, and they are veiled in a huge mound of ivy. The vines have crept up the truck and collected in a mass right above my head, draping toward the footpath.

Suddenly I felt like I was at an altar. I have no idea how it happened or what began the movement of my body in this direction but without thinking, I ran toward the tree and flung my arms around its trunk. I nestled my head in the leaves, breathing them in and I cried. Salt and chlorophyll. Bark and sap and snot. I got all up in it. I didn’t care about the people walking past. I needed to ground godammit and this is the only way I knew how.

Almost as though the tree was some kind of portal or time machine, I got transported back to Lake Rotoiti, the sacred lake I grew up with. I could smell the towering trees of the forest! I could picture the horizon! I could hear the native birds! 

Lake Rotoiti, New Zealand

I stayed nestled in the arms of this tree and, I swear, she held me back. Okay, roll your eyes and call me a treehugger, and you’d be right! This small act spoke to something so fundamental about the human experience. Our bodies know what we need before our minds. Something in me needed to ground and I looked to the most grounded thing I know. A tree. Held in place by roots running deep into the ground. And by touching, making contact with this ancient organism, I was, myself, grounded into the earth, able to feel my feet on the ground and sense my interconnectedness with the world around me.

All around us is the living proof that we can withstand the storm. Wether it is a literal war of people and weaponry or the war of the senses, the mind or the the onslaught of machinery for city development. There is violence all around us. Psychological, physical, environmental, mental and spiritual. 

But every time we see a tree, a shrub, a plant or even a weed in the ground, we get to witness, in real time, the resilience of nature to withstand all kinds of environments and more than often, to thrive.

 After many deep breaths and the words ‘thank you thank you thank you’ directed to the sound, quiet structure in my arms, I left the embrace of the tree and went back to my apartment. 

Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but that tree saved me on Friday. She found me right at breaking point. And through her, I found centre again.

As I write about sticky thoughts and silence, I am reminded that there is much I have to learn about both these things, and it’s just like the universe to throw me a good testing ground. I was grateful to be able to practice the suggestions I had prescribed in my post, but it was that tree that knew most what I needed. Just touch. Sensation. Faith that there are threads of knowing that are woven between me and everything. Tree’s quietly show us to how to root down and float on the wind like trembling leaves, yet we insist on attaching ourselves to everything, leaking out our energy in every direction, feet hovering off the ground, flying on a Citi Bike through the streets…

The tree in her rich silence doesn’t shout. She waits for us to notice. She’s heard the mycelium talking underground and she knows we are supported in ways we have no real comprehension of. But we get a hint of it when we’re with the trees.

Only if we’re listening though.

Everything is shouting and screaming all at once.
Everything is shouting and screaming all at once.

And so begins the great task of being human. To listen in the midst of chaos.

I still don’t know where my inhaler is. Mayne a homeless man found it, maybe he can’t afford an inhaler and it was a godsend, just laying there primed for him to pick it up. Maybe I threw it in the garbage when I throw out the packaging, I have no idea. But I guess it was worth it to lose it. I learnt something. Today I will get a new inhaler, and I will vow to keep it safe. I will remember that even when I can’t breathe, there may be some unexpected grace, waiting to lovingly remind me how to do it again. 

Watercolour of Lake Rotoiti, by me

Till next time.