Birch Trees

I called her Amma—an enormous birch tree on a swampy piece of property we once owned. She sported a weathered scar running down her belly from a lightning strike, not unlike my own surgery-scarred belly.  I’d walk in the woods to her side and sit and talk with her like an old friend. I still carry a piece of her bark in a locket.  She had that Presence very old trees can impart—an energy mixed from the potent ingredients of time, imperfection, sturdiness and stillness.

On the Ridge, Amma’s kin people the new land, too, from slender and giddy saplings to giants larger than her own girth. They brave the raw edges of the cedar swamp, cuddle up to aging sugar maples and spring from the stumps of dead trees.

Birch have relatively short lifespans, usually only about 140 years, but that’s certainly long enough to get to know some of the seniors in the woods. They are the “first pioneers” of newly cut land, along with the poplar trees, taking root and growing swiftly.  That growth rate tends to make their heartwood very soft and easy to work with.  The Native Peoples of the North Country used the birch for a great many necessities of life—canoes, containers, art papers, medicines, food (sap, young leaves and bark turned into flour) and for wrapping the bodies of the dead.

Medicinally, the leaves of the birch have been used to treat urinary tract infections of all kinds, increase urine output and easing arthritis and rashes as well as countering hair loss.  Its sap can be used to make wine, and it is believed to help break up kidney stones and serve as a blood purifying tonic.  I recall tapping many kinds of tress in my seventh-grade science class, and I voted the birch tree syrup as the best of all, beating out the more traditional sugar maple syrup for its lightness and mild flavor. The tea made from fresh leaves and buds in the spring is rather strong but not unpleasant tasting I’m told—I’ve made a note to myself to give it a try this Spring.

Birch tend to grow in small family groups, and their leaves dance in the wind like the poplar’s. In the dark of winter or the fullness of deep green summertime, they glow in the woods, lighting the way. Each bark pattern is unique, running horizontally, and if I read the deep black marks on the white or pinkish skin as their “name”, I don’t lose my place so easily when rambling around off the trails.

 I will find a special tree this winter and start again a practice I love…writing prayers on pieces of shed birch bark and tying them with wool yarn to the branches of a special wishing tree.  The wind carries my words and eventually the small note will drop to earth to be composted by the forest into new life. I started this simple ritual when my childhood friend, Kathy, passed away, and continued it as friends Sheila, Sue, and Tom also left my life. I’m not big on corporate ritual, but the private act of tying a strip of birch bark to a tree comforts and sustains my personal journey.

Birch Leaf Tea

Gray wind lifts the prayer flags,

greens, blues and yellows flapping,

wild Wind Horse verses tossed with browning leaves,

Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha! and Amen.

I bond with my land today,

laying the harvest of a deer in white paper.

I assure the Lifeforce

I will leap up from deep within,

make birch leaf tea in the Spring,

and hang my hammock in the summer cedar groves,

give a few drops of blood back to mosquitoes,

dream deepest winter where the bones of white-tail ancestors

 become root and bark.

A fleshy meal will swirl together all manner of families

and wildlife,

and loving.

Hey! You gusty, pushy, noisy winter wind.

Keep blessing

 the gray canvas of the sky

with giddy multicolored prayers.