LOAD BEARING

The first time I understood healing I wasn’t working on a body. I was standing in a client’s yard staring at a tree.

I sometimes do mobile massage, I bring the table to people, and this client met me in the driveway. Before I could even unload there it was. A massive trunk with metal coming out of it. Not leaning against it. Literally out of it. Rusted hardware emerging from live wood like the tree was growing a fence instead of leaves. My first thought was that something had happened inside it… maybe somebody had done this to it… but it looked too complex for an accident. Too old. Too swallowed.

I must have been staring because my client said, almost bored, like she’d explained it a hundred times: “Trees aren’t polite, you know. They don’t grow around things. They grow anyway.”

The tree did the only thing trees know how to do. It grew. Bark folds over the wire like a slow mouth. Wood lays itself down in rings around the intrusion year after year until the fence post isn’t leaning against the tree anymore, it’s inside it. Cut that tree open fifty years later and the saw will spark. The metal never left. The tree just refused to let it decide the shape.

That’s the closest thing to healing I’ve ever seen.

Because this is what nobody tells you in the waiting rooms, in the pews, in the podcasts with their soft voiced hosts: you cannot get rid of it. Not really. Not the way they sell it. Trauma is not a stain and you are not a fabric. It’s not a tenant you can evict or a file you can delete or a basement you can pour concrete over and call a foundation. The body keeps its records whether the mind consents or not. A smell can drop you through a trapdoor twenty years deep. A tone of voice can put your heart in your ears. The event is over but the encoding is not. That’s just what nervous systems do. They remember what almost ended them. Forever. As a courtesy.

So the question was never can I remove it. The question is how much space it keeps. The memory stays. Its authority doesn’t have to.

The scream can become a voice. The voice can become a fact. The fact can become furniture… still there, still yours, still heavy, but you stop bumping into it in the dark. You learn where it sits. You dust around it. Some mornings you have coffee at the same table with it and neither of you says anything and that silence is not surrender, it’s peace, and only people who’ve lived it can tell the difference.

I used to want the renovation. The before and after. The testimony with the good lighting. Look at her now. I wanted to be the kind of healed that photographs well. What I got instead is a tree with metal in it. And this is the part I didn’t expect, the part that would sound wrong in a support group but is the truest thing I own: I can’t take it out now. It’s load bearing. The rings I grew were shaped by what they had to hold and those rings hold up everything I’ve built since. The wound didn’t make me… I want to be careful there, it doesn’t get the credit… but the growing around it did. My patience was grown around it. My eye for other people’s hidden metal came from having my own. The way I can put my hands on a hurting body and know where the fence line runs, that was grown around it too. .

Remove the metal and the tree doesn’t become whole.

It becomes hollow.

So no I don’t believe we get rid of it. I’ve stopped believing anyone does. I believe we outgrow it in the literal sense. We grow out, around, over, past, in every direction it doesn’t occupy, until the thing that was once the whole story is just a hard place in the wood. Sparking the saw. Surprising the arborist. A rusted stripe of proof that something once tried to fence me in

and the tree got enormous anyway.

—e