The Shade — What the Tree Gives to Whoever Arrives

In the dry open country where the baobab grows, shade is not a small comfort. It is a place. Travelers stop for it. Herds are brought to it. Work that cannot be done in the sun gets done under a tree.

And the baobab makes more of it than most trees do. The trunk is vast, the branches spread wide, and where the tree stands the ground stays cool through the worst of the afternoon. The tree is not trying to be generous. It stands there, and the shade comes with it.

The shade is not solid

Sit beneath a baobab and you will find the shade comes in pieces. Light arrives through the leaves in small bright patches. Nothing about the cover is total, and the tree does not try to deepen it.

We are the same way. Whatever we are able to give another person comes filtered through our own body and our own history. It has gaps in it. The baobab does not apologize for the gaps in its shade, and it does not close them either.

It does not choose who sits in it

The tree gives shade to whoever arrives. Herder or stranger, grateful or not, the ground beneath it is not reserved. It keeps no record of who has sat there before.

Something in us wants to choose. We give where the gift will be seen, and it costs little to admit that. We have written before about the Fruit-Givers, who make beauty and hand it on, and the harder half of that practice is the handing on. Fruit leaves the branch and belongs to whoever picks it up.

A tree that gives this way is not careless. It is rooted. It knows what it has and it lets that be enough for the people who arrive, without asking first whether they deserve it.

The one standing in the sun

Shade is made out of the tree’s own body. The tree stays out in the open while it makes it, leaves facing the burning part of the day directly. Someone is always taking the direct light.

In most houses there is a person who stands where the sun hits, so that others can be out of it. In a community, that arrangement is mostly quiet. It is rarely announced and rarely counted.

We have written before about the hollow, and the room the tree keeps inside itself. Shade is the same room built without walls, open on every side, kept for whoever comes.

A practice for the week

Leave something open this week that anyone may take, and do not decide in advance who deserves it. An hour of your attention will do. So will a skill you stopped valuing because it comes easily to you.

Then notice how much of what holds you up was made by people you have never met. The shade you stand in was paid for by something that grew before you arrived. The water in the trunk was collected in a season nobody was watching. We have been sitting in that kind of shade all our lives and have thanked it almost never.

The tree does not know who is sitting under it, and it does not need to. It stands where it was planted, and the shade falls where it falls, and the afternoon passes. What are you holding open for whoever arrives?

The Eye watches. The Tree stands. The Delve awaits.