The pinecones came from a hike I went on yesterday in the national forest with two friends and a dog. There were many pinecones on the ground, but the first one I picked up and held, in sunshine diffuse from light clouds, was reddish brown and tiny. It had been sitting nearly upright on the forest floor, near the path. But it wasn’t just color and size that drew me; it was the mesmerizing pattern. Of course, all such cones (pinecones, spruce cones, fir cones, regardless of differences in shape and size) have that swirling symmetry. But each one also has a unique gesture and texture, embedded as it is in a certain place, in the play of light and shadow: the space we share at the moment we meet.
I was smitten enough to pick it up. I carried it in my palm. My friends saw me doing this and wondered. Then one of them picked up a different kind, almost as small, also radically beautiful, its palette a subtle range from grey to rust, with black and green and brown accents. She put it in my palm next to the other one, then took pictures. Then the other friend found one, its colors different again. We looked at all three, delighting in the awe inspired by them, by the feeling of unfamiliar beauty in the familiar.
I know that pinecones are what they are because pine trees have devised, over their evolutionary history, that way of spreading their seed. But what a glorious design! Quite complex but simple, appealing to an artist’s eye as well as to an engineer’s mind. The wide-open cones we found had already launched their seed before they fell, their structure having served its purpose. But what about all those colors on a seed-empty cone? Why attract a human eye? What am I missing here? Plenty, I’m sure. This intellectual line of thought wasn’t what captivated me, though. I was, instead, entranced by how they looked cradled in my hand, both when I looked down at them and when my friend took a picture and showed it to me: the isolated hand in the frame with the wholeness of pinecones in a palm. And I was also struck by what I really wanted to write about: how carrying them made me feel, what it was like to hold them, which I cannot, I’m afraid, put into words.
I have brought many other pinecones home over my decades living adjacent to a forest. They sit decoratively on shelves, windowsills, the edges of porches, amazing me by how long they have lasted, reminding me that there was magic when I first found them. Though I don’t remember their stories now, I suspect that each reached out to me from stillness, like what happened yesterday. Each opened a portal into a way of sensing the large and unknown world around me as the world to which I was attached, the world I belonged in, regardless of my unfortunate human tendency to feel separate and alone. Yesterday, the pinecones in my hand had brought me back to this quiet truth, the reality of belonging.
At the start of yesterday’s hike, my friend had told me about the poet’s murder at the hands of authorities. But I had let that thought go for the duration of the hike. I’m getting better at that, at staying where I actually am and living it, rather than following my thoughts to somewhere I cannot affect. Then, this morning, that friend texted me a link to a poem the murdered woman had written five years ago. Sitting at my computer, holding her poem and the knowledge of her murder in the same hand, I fell through a portal into the ugly pattern of human history, this denying of our belonging; the repeating return of corrupt regimes (the Spanish inquisition, the third reich, the taliban, nameless other massacres in countries all over the globe, including America, generation after generation); how humans obsessed by power and gain want to destroy the humans who want to sustain humanity within the more than human context we have no choice but to be part of.
Then I looked at the pinecones sitting on my dresser, where I’d photographed them only moments earlier. They looked different from when they were in the sunlight, in my palm as I walked yesterday, but still beautiful in the lamplight. And I turned my thoughts back to the experience of finding them. The pinecones had opened a path into awe, into their pattern of beauty; they’d kindled my curiosity about the way life thrives in small acts outside our notice, constantly. Each cone testified to the attachment of everything to everything, connections that the darker side of human nature so wants to deny, to ignore, to crush.
Poets, creatives, often with little power in their own lifetimes, have been our hope from the beginning of human culture, through their capacity for vision, their creations, their ways of seeing what has not yet been seen but needs to be. They have been the ones to name the darkness as well as to find new ways through it. They are the reason why we are still here despite the darker forces of human nature. They are the ones guiding us toward discovering better ways to be human in this world, imagining that we can evolve beyond the principle of might is right, beyond the limits of black and white thinking, beyond the notion of human separateness from the rest of life, beyond the brutality of tribal rivalry.
I am humbled by the pinecone because each of its weightless seeds carries the capacity to become a tree, to carry the promise of a living forest into a future I can’t see but of which I am a part, along with everyone else, every day. I am in awe of pinecones, their subtle array of hues, each a small, exquisitely patterned spiraling structure designed to hold and let go, intentionally, according to a plan no human could ever conceive of let alone devise. No small thing is small, or so it seems to this human found by a pinecone on a warm January day.