Anne Richey

“It will be a great day in the history of science if we sometime discover a damp shadow elsewhere in the universe where a fungus has sprouted.” Recently, this opening sentence in Marilynne Robinson’s essay “Thinking Again,” catapulted me back to an off-trail foray I once took into Duke Forest, a large tract managed by Duke University’s forestry school. 

That forest, where I spent many weekends as a teen, was an enchanting new “elsewhere” in the universe to a city girl like me.  One day, standing among towering pines, I happened to glance down and saw a clump of exquisite waxy white stalks topped with frilly overlapping petals. I assumed they were some kind of exotic fungus, but later learned these were flowers – aptly named Ghost Pipes.  The mix that day of those other-worldly plants with the pungent pine woods represents an ineffable spirit-chemistry that has suffused me ever since when in the natural world – particularly among trees.

Years later, reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I experienced a shock of recognition when I encountered her story about the young girl who saw “the tree with the lights in it.”  At age three, I had seen a tree with lights in it while exploring a neighbor’s backyard. Across a wide gully, dogwood trees were in bloom, shining in the sunlight. What my eyes saw was a multitude of luminous white patches like stars come down to earth.  I was “lifted and struck” as Dillard puts it – then running headlong towards them, only to be grabbed by my mom. I felt so let down, but I didn’t have the words to explain to her my urgent need to touch them.   

Now when I write poems and am struggling for a word to express a thought, I feel a sick little lurch in my stomach when it doesn’t come quickly – as if that experience of the trees with stars still haunts me. Emily Dickinson wrote that she “found the words to every thought. . . but one –”  I appreciate the elusiveness of that “one.”