Two Kinds of Wood

I got my first tattoo today, up in Asheville, thanks to the amazing folks at Thistle and Pearl. It’s a black walnut branch running up the inside of my forearm… the compound leaves fanning out the way they do in high summer here in our backyard… and standing beside the lowest of them, a plain cross.

Anyone who has read much of what I write knows I did not choose this arbitrarily. The black walnut in our backyard has been the patient anchor of nearly everything I’ve been doing the last few years, from my dissertation work to the poems to the long habit of walking out to look at one tree until it begins to look back. Juglans nigra is our current naming convention, thanks to Carl Linnaeus and his system of classification in the 1750s, which I taught so many middle schoolers about in my Life Science class. Even the Romans could not name it without reaching beyond the tree: Iovis glans, the nut of Jupiter; in Greek, Διὸς βάλανος (Diòs bálanos), the acorn of Zeus. They buried a god in the word.

The black walnut, for all that it has taught me and all of its beauty, is no gentle neighbor. It weeps juglone into the soil, quietly discouraging much of what tries to root beneath it… a tree that makes hard ground. I’ve spent the last few years trying to describe that paradox without flinching from either half of it… the tree that shelters and the same tree that suppresses, both inside of one beloved trunk.

Which is why the Cross has to stand beside it. The oldest witnesses did not always call it a Cross. Peter and the author of Luke/Acts called it a tree… ξύλον (xýlon), the plain word for a beam or a living trunk. “They killed him by hanging him on a tree,” ἐπὶ ξύλου (Acts 5:30).

So, there are two kinds of wood on my arm now, and beneath them really only one: the walnut that makes hard ground, and the ξύλον planted in the hardest ground of all, out of which, against every allelopathy, something green keeps insisting on coming up.

That is most of my work, carried out now where I can see it. Empathy before ethics, as I keep urging. The tree before the doctrine. And under both of them, in Piedmont red clay and Blue Ridge cove alike, the stubborn Carolina rumor of a resurrection.

I’m heading back to Thistle and Pearl shortly to complete the final piece with a quote from Edith Stein’s work: “My longing for truth was a single prayer” to complete my own journey through life and on the way to this PhD!