"I entrust myself to the earth. The earth entrusts itself to me." This is my gardening mantra. It melts my anger when the soil is rocky and my back is sore. It helps me to go gently.

I am seeking lessons in embodiment. For a while now, I have suspected that things are not as they seem.

April 10: The snow came yesterday and the air is cold. I go back to the tree and am surprised by the warmth of her trunk. Does she store the heat of the day for the cold of a winter's night? The rains for the drought? The dry for the deluge? Do her cells remember?

April 20. I fear that I am entering strange territory, and I search for allies. I find four. Two commentators: Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde and two cultivators: Gertrude Jekyll and Friedensreich Hundertwasser. I have no idea why I'm invoking these people, but I feel better for having extracted them from my bookshelves. I try my hand at aphorisms: TREES CATCH THE WIND. TREES CANNOT BE OTHER THAN TREES, TREES REBALANCE WHEN THEIR LIMBS ARE LOPPED OFF.

April 21: I briefly consider becoming a tree activist. Why have the park officials allowed the trees by the pond to grow unchecked while pruning the trees on the hill? The pond trees have young growing at their side. But what is to become of the hill trees? I resolve to speak to someone in authority. As yet, I have not done so.

April 26: I need to communicate with the trees, to tell them something. Unable to articulate my own thoughts, I decide to read them a piece by someone I admire. I choose Matthew Fox because I'm impressed by the fact that the Holy Christian Church could not silence him. For some reason, I feel that Matthew Fox is good reading material for a tree.

May 2: Everyone is very excited because the trees are coming into blossom, and there is much more human traffic in the park. Odd, this attraction to blossoms, when they are but a finger flick for a tree. I wonder if the tips of the roots are flicking below. And I do my yoga practice in the space between flicks.

May 7: I am sitting under the tree where yesterday two grown-up sons brought their ancient wheelchaired mother for a picnic. They pushed her up the hill, but she walked the final way to the tree on foot, a son under each arm. The blossoms have mostly fallen. They are pink on the ground. I am learning to share the space with others who come to the grove.

May 12: Stormy weather. I hug the trees, smelling their wetness. Baby robins are hatching above. I had sought the wildness of the storm but am humbled. My eyes are unsuited to look anywhere but at my feet, which are drenched in rain. I climb the hill, bareheaded, in search of the warmth of my studio, where I begin to paint. The trees stand without me in the rain.

May 23: Rain is dripping from leaves, the sun is at my back. I am beginning to recognize in myself the symptoms of love for this grove and all that is here: each hatchling, each leaf, the light, the air, the smell of the grass. These are my teachers. These are my others. It is important to love what is other than myself.

June 7: What flows though the arms flows from the heart. I return to the ancient mother's tree. And with this tree, I dance the dance of the branches, the dance of the arms. My feet naked in the warm morning grass, I find holiness in the spread of her limbs, her opening core. Today my being includes a tree.

June 9: I am painting a love song to the tree than I love. The tree that is not my lover. The tree that embodies the two in the one. The split and the balance.

June 16: I am lying in the space cast by a tree without knowledge, thought, or words.

June 19: We meet each other in a stage of metamorphosis, on a plane of birth to death. We are in constant cycle. The leaves are here and soon they will be gone. The birds are here and soon they will be gone. So too the trees - the cherries, sweet and succulent. They live in grace and the inevitability of erosion.

June 21: It is summer. The sun is hot and high. The grove has turned bright green, yet I, as human, am blood red and, throughout my life, will be so. I searched for truth without and now have come inside. The trees my mirrors, as are all things our mirrors for the truth that lies within us.

There is a story about several Buddhist nuns who came together in a garden. They sat in silence for a long time. Then one began to laugh. She pointed to an object and said, "They call that a tree." The others laughed too. They all sat together for a while, and then they parted.