Gateway in the Ficus

It was four years before I ventured to do any significant tree work at my home in India, where a brick wall protects and shapes a small, rectangular compound whose dirt and gravel are interrupted only by cement tanks and trees. The trees were planted when I moved in, and from my height, carefully watered, they grew in open space into big, leafy balloons pruned only around the barbed wire. Except for the ficus that aimed its narrow dimension straight toward the overhead power lines.

I kept thinking that it needed to be pruned but took no step to assign a worker to the job. I had old jeans and a long-sleeved shirt from America for gardening, but I felt no urge to do the work myself. I cannot explain what happened, except that one day, with a brief look at the ficus, I was instantly in my work clothes, on a step ladder, with a pruner and loppers, up inside the ficus totally hidden and through a gateway.

As a girl, I would sit by a bamboo bush where the white boards of a fence met the side of a barn and listen to the hush, hush, hush of the leaves, a sound that not since had returned, until now as I stood, unmoving. I remembered being told that I was out-of-my-body with my balance at my shoulders, not lower where it was supposed to be. But here where I was protected, hidden with a wonderful secrecy where no one could see me in my home among sheltering leaves, I was in my body and one with the ficus. I had come to do a job, but instead traveled back in memory then inward to a place new. I wanted to stay.

My realization is, “Other worlds are only seconds away and can open unbidden.”