I am a Redwood Tree

I spent last week in a human cadaver dissection lab. People came from distant lands and foreign countries to join this expedition into the body. Our leader Gil Hedley read us poetry every morning and refers to us as “somanauts”. We held hands around the bodies on the gurneys, we called them our teachers. I am different now. Changed. I have studied anatomy for 25 years, but this was different. I have worked with cadavers on and off for 10 years but again this was new. I held the scalpel and hemostats. I cut the tissue. My fascination turned to horror time and time again. Sometimes I was able to steer my mind back to the Fascination Hall I had paid to visit, and eventually, the wisdom of my body would keep asking for a break; a whisper at first, then louder and louder, a toddler ready to leave tugging at my lab coat. I would remove my lab coat and surgical gloves to escape outside to the natural world. The trees were simpler to sit with. The dead bodies were natural too of course, just more complicated for my hands to make peace with. 

 Four years ago, I sat and watched my dear mother-in-law, Betty, leave her body behind. It took less than a week for her body to transition from living to dead. It was a beautiful thing to witness. Yes, it was hard, but loss always is. Witnessing her leaving, and holding space for her was an honor. Our bodies are a beautiful vessel even when lifeless. Words stop making sense when I try to work out the space between the dead and the living. I can still hear Betty’s voice and council. I ask her to help in energy healing sessions and she obliges. I dream about her sometimes and when I wake, I have memories of her skin and the shape of her body when we hug.  

Gil speaks about us being “one body” and that the particular form that houses our spirit is a model of the larger unit. This is a new perspective, I like it. It brings more reverence to our individual shape with less pressure to conform to some ideal. There is no ideal! Just the living and the dead. How lucky are we to be among the living? And yet, what if the other side is not so far away after all? I visit the spirit of my dog, Max, regularly and every time I do, he licks my faces and runs around me with immense joy. I feel my loved ones with me every day, they are not gone. 

But back to the trees. Someone asked me the other day what my spirit animal was. A redwood tree, I responded. I know it doesn’t make sense with words, but my body knows. I think of my dear friends like my sister trees. Scientists have discovered that trees share nutrients through their roots. Even across species. Gil dissected a heart showing us the blood vessels and how they loop around and look like a root ball of a tree. He talked about the vortex forces of rivers and blood vessels and how they are the same. All over the body, familiar forms show themselves. The superficial fascia, which we pondered may represent the Divine Feminine, resembles the structure and organization of grapefruit. Is all life more closely woven than we realize? Yes. Our teacher in the lab had black skin. When we dissected the pigment layer of his skin away from the epidermis we were astounded by its mass. It was a few cells thick. Thinner than the most delicate tissue paper. Yet, wars, hate and the gravest injustices humans inflict on other humans are often based on this minuscule division. We are made of the same tissues throughout our whole body, yet we have an infinite amount of combinations. We are all the same yet uniquely our different selves. I love us. My admiration and respect for the human form are renewed, deepened and folded over on itself in a million ways. I will let the new understanding integrate into my knowledge in every massage session. I will understand that the trees and rivers are models of us or us of them. I will strive to be a sister tree, connected to my fellow humans here on Earth, my loved ones on the other side, and a constant student of our human form, trees, rivers, skin, and hearts.