Nature speaks to us and calls us to attention. Last night my eyes fixed on a large cottonwood tree by the bank of the river. It is one of the few larger trees left standing from a grove after the summer floods. The light changes quickly in those last few moments of dusk, turns gold, and the tree vibrates in front of me. Taking several photos of it, first at quite a distance and then closer and closer as each branch banks up against the edge of the frame until the entire format holds the filigree tree. The roots expose the soft soil deep in the center of the tree. It stands, large and tenacious, clinging to the rim of the earth and grasses, shaping new edges to the landscape.

It has been several months since I have seen this tree and I am never sure when I come back to the land if it will be there or will have tumbled over. Its size and presence tie into my insides with a knot that I can feel. I don't wish to untie this knot because it holds me steady to the rest of the universe. I go to this tree and it teaches me I must both hang on to what is dear and be ready to let it go. The tree teeters between life and death, takes nothing for granted, no longer securely placed amongst a group of brothers and sisters chattering together as the wind moves through their leaves.

Each time I travel to this valley and see this tree I stop at a halfway point in another desert, in California, and visit my Father who is now eighty-five. His heart reaches out, with its roots exposed. He has had surgery on his heart that has formed new maintenance for his life, a scaffold for existence to be built on day after day, never quite strong enough to build something really sturdy but, like a tree house or a pigeon coop that we made when I was a child, it will do. When I was a child we found enough scrap wood and good strong wire and many nails. What we made worked as a place for the pigeons to come and go, lay their eggs and to focus their journeys out and back for more nesting materials.

I see my Father as this tree, a brilliant light that seems to fill him, glowing deeply with his love. He is a father cottonwood with the sun and tree reflecting one another. His gold aura calls you to attention. My Father reminisces about rocks we gathered or places that we visited. He wonders about himself now, if he takes up air space or if it's worth it that he keeps breathing. He survives on this edge like the big cottonwood, not in some depressing reminder that death is near but by expressing a life of vulnerability with everything exposed and poised. I look up to him and see his leaves blowing and look down and see it is hard for his legs to grab enough earth to walk easily but in his trunk I find him, solid, life giving and full of heart and laughter. He lives with the quicksilver of his humor and the questions of faith we all must ask, daily.

Because of my Father nature speaks to me; in the rocks I found as a child, the leaves and pebbles I drew as an adult. They all have my Father in them and they will keep me like stars in remembrance of the universe. I can find more easily the place where my Father stands on the bank, like this big cottonwood taking in the brilliant evening light at dusk, a light that gives the tree its due for a few short moments, in gold light. Here is another chance to behold its unique and solemn dignity as it fills my senses and my heart with a larger story.