Mediating Rituals: On Climbing Trees, Litter, and Reading in Sheds

 A personal essay by Brenton Reeser.

Can a piece of trash connect you to everything? 

Recently I recovered an old iPhone memo from when I was fifteen or so, entitled “Tree Times.” It was a collection of tree climbing times from a span of a couple of weeks where I would time myself climbing and descending various trees on my family’s five acres. I worked and worked at it until I could climb and descend some of the trees in under a minute.

I’m not really sure why I timed myself—the real reason I climbed those trees was for those transcendental moments after reaching the highest branches, when the breeze would ripple through the tree and down my limbs as it washed over my face. His limbs—the tree’s—were always smooth and cool, not dead but still sleeping, waiting to wake up with the rest of the land. 

Sitting in the branches of my favorite tree was particularly timeless, or at least in my memory it fades in and out of time. This picture I have of one of these memories tells me it’s spring by the forsythia in full yellow bloom, but the feeling of sitting feels timeless, sitting after a stretch in the boughs of this tree, looking into the glorious rolling clouds that tip the Great Plains—watching God while hugged safe by Him. 

Indeed, the whole thing had the rain-washed smell of ritual—every week for a few weeks, climbing the tree and feeling the connectedness of the whole world through the tree and in the air. However, I experienced it almost as though it were a separate world, one that I could only access so deeply in a tree, or in-between moments caught out of time. The almost-sacramental taste of Missourian dust and drinking of springtime sunlight bent time, as it were, from the normal solemn marching line to a cyclical track. The weeks were like a wheel around the tree, revolving around these spiritual moments that were outside the cycle but very much centered inside of it. 

Was mine a new world? A newly interpreted world, a newly mediated world—for mediation is but a form of re-interpretation—mediated by waving tree branches conducting the wind. Wind mediated afresh, recovered by the tree. Mediation—a word more often associated with conflict managers than Christ, and more often with Christ than with trees; yet when I sat high in the branches to feel the world, wasn’t that a kind of recovery? A recovery of the hard world, the same world that watched me drawing homework into the deep morning, the sad world spent moving from house to house like lived leapfrog. Only a momentary recovery, but a recovery nonetheless mediated by a transcendental tree. My bonsais still feel like little fragments meditating me back to these transcendental moments.

While many of my transcendental moments lean towards rituals, some fall much closer to epiphany. Among all the terrible writing I produced when I was a teenager, one of my favorites records a moment one evening waiting for my mom to pick me up from school. Leaning against the school door late one evening, waiting, I saw a rather ordinary piece of litter tumbling across the sidewalk outside. Being the melodramatic teenager I was, it was one of the most poetic things I’d ever seen:

The Green Paper

As I looked on into the distant clouds, a green paper blew into my limited view of the sidewalk. The sad, folded paper, subject to the whims of the wind, tumbled over and over itself, rolling across the cold hard pavement. Then it paused in the middle of the sidewalk, temporarily relieved from the gusting and blowing. It was not to last here long. The indifferent wind soon tugged at the weary sheet, pushing it westward against its bends, wishing that it had something to hold it down. Slowly it slid leftward out of my view, not wanting to leave the safety of the pavement but with a sudden burst of wind fell off. 

I thought it gone, forever lost in the beyond, but then I saw it, lingering between a bush and the school wall. It was as if it was looking back toward the pavement, longing to go back but caught by the incessant callings of the wind.  That lonely green paper paused, waiting for … something. It must have been. Patiently it hung back, watching, wondering—but when I glanced away, it left, forever dancing in the gales of the past.

Though my teenage retelling was over the top for sure, there’s still something here that recaptures my imagination like the first time. I think to my teenage self, and to my present self, I was that green paper—“subject,” “weary,” “longing;” caught unawares in the bushy brambles of proto-depression. It’s telling that when I really became depressed, I revisited this piece of writing (and some of my terrible poems) fairly regularly, as though it could mediate my depression to myself.

Moreover, I’ve never had the luxury of looking at lost paper quite the same way—I bet Moses’s heart skipped ever so slight a beat whenever he saw a bush, after the burning one. Will this one burn? Will this one burn? After finding myself in a forsaken piece of trash, something so banal as to be almost imperceptible most of the time, I catch myself asking every green paper—will you burn? 

The rest of them decline spontaneous combustion. 

Of course, half of this little piece is stolen from The Great Gatsby. It was a defining work for me at the time, though ostensibly unspiritual. Indeed, some of my friends and family were a little concerned that a novel about the wanna-be-affair of a Prohibition bootlegger became one of my favorites. But even besides the sublimated echoes of religiosity within the book—Gatsby’s wistful, pseudo-ritualistic staring towards Daisy Buchanan’s green dock light, for instance—the spiritual excess that entranced me in Gatsby was its effusive language. It was so entrancing to my teenage self that I determined one day to go read it out loud, alone. 

It was a beautiful spring day. After I got off the school bus, first one home as usual, I grabbed the shed key and my copy of Gatsby. I still remember the way the sun lit the grass as I walked up to the shed door and let myself in. Dodging around the tools and projects, I settled myself on the comfy seat of the riding lawnmower. After checking once again that I was alone, I began to read. 

The linguistic pleasure was almost immediate—I loved the way Fitzgerald’s language rolled off my tongue. Periodically, nervousness and tinny echoes sent me looking about the shed and peering out the door, to be sure I was really alone—but almost immediately I was back on the lawnmower, reading. 

I marveled at the way the words drifted together and lifted me somewhere else, as though the words on the page transfigured me to be with Fitzgerald, reading over his shoulder. And not just the words on the page—the words in breathy air vibrating through a throaty hum, dashing then slow step with Nick across the Buchanan’s parlor, ethereal curtains leaping close to timelessness, trembling from feeling haloed in lingual light. The language itself had a quality of the infinite that tasted like God as I read, as though, like climbing the tree and writing about litter, the individual experience of experiencing could somehow connect me to everything else spiritually. It was as though within this shed, watching this litter, in this tree, there exists an infinitely small piece of everything else, from every other moment. 

While I was in this mood, it was as though the spiritual part of the language mediated my experience anew to me. Not only like the mediation centering weeks on a tree, like a language, every spoke radiating to the intermediary tree and then back out into the world; but also like I was with God, looking outside to the paper rocking in the wind, but also with the paper. Mental teleportation, dual-location, being twice, thrice intertwined. It was beyond normal language, beyond normal trash and trees, like a melding of the nonhuman and human. Not even just the nonhuman to human, but the human immediately to the human. Like myself to myself, myself to Fitzgerald, ritual volta and returning: invisible, immediate mediation. Ritualized mediation.

The central question of my ritual: when Christ was alone at Gethsemane, praying on that olive tree, did God mediate us to Him? Did he also partake of us—our grief, our sin, our sorrow? Were we the mediators, the interpreters, of our experience to Him? In that transcendental moment, in that burst of the infinite—are we the finite infinite?—perhaps in that moment, I will share a small piece, I will share small pieces of trees, of litter, of literature.

Image credits: "The Great Gatsby" by yoppy is licensed under CC BY 2.0; "Jesus Praying in Gethsemane" by Harry Anderson is licensed under the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.