Never Tell Me The Odds
The healing is in the trying.
A few weeks ago, a freak winter storm coated every limb of every tree in Austin in ice. It was as beautiful as it was deadly: tree limbs fell to the ground all over town, snapping power lines in the process. Some people were out of power for as much as a week. In my own backyard, a limb from a hackberry in our neighbor’s yard fell dramatically over the fence, barely clearing my kitchen window and back door. Ice snapped off the tiniest branches and left the ground looking like it was strewn with broken glass. A few days later, my husband, an arborist, took a chainsaw to the whole mess and neatly stacked the cut branches by the curb. The ice melted into the grown. All that’s left is the half torn off limb of the hackberry, like a partially peeled banana, revealing the heartwood exposed and doomed.
Early March is full-on spring in Central Texas: the bluebonnets are out, the mountain laurel blooms are fading, trees are leafing out with that soft, electric green of new shoots. I stubbornly keep my windows open even though this is the worst time or year, allergy-wise, so that my space can be filled the with exuberant song of the mockingbirds, cedar waxwings, house sparrows, cardinals, and wrens that reside in my neighborhood.
I’ve begun a practice of stepping outside in the morning to greet the land.1 With my coffee in hand, I put my bare feet on the rough, messy ground. I look up at the trees and notice how much bigger the leaves have gotten since yesterday. I walk over to the mountain laurel and put my face to its fading blooms to inhale their grape Kool-Aid scent that thrills me so, drinking in every last bit before we say goodbye to them for another year. It’s been grounding in the most basic sense of the word; it’s also been a practice in sensory delight.
One such morning this past week I noticed something: the half-severed limb of the hackberry is sprouting leaves. Tender baby green shoots are popping up as the doomed limb reaches over the fence. There’s no way this limb will survive; the whole tree, much to my chagrin, faces a similar fate. And yet, it’s spring. And a tree’s business, in spring, is to make leaves, is to make life. And so that’s what it’s doing.
I am so moved by this, in a very Mary-Oliver-meets-Ian-Malcolm, life-finds-a-way sense. The tree doesn’t care that this limb is precarious as fuck, that it’s exposed and ruined. The tree doesn’t conceive of itself in this way–that’s my own human lens making meaning of what I see, adding my own narrative of late-stage capitalism and climate collapse onto what, to a tree, might be just a temporary setback. A dramatic re-shaping, for sure, but absent some dude with a chainsaw cutting off its connection to the ground, this freak ice storm needn’t be an ending. If we had let the fallen limb take over the backyard, my arborist husband tells me, in a few years entire-ass tree trunks would likely sprout from the places where the fallen branches made contact with the earth.
It’s been painful to see the peeled-back bark, the exposed heartwood of this tree outside my window, because don’t we all feel exposed and doomed? Like we’ve had a limb torn off? Like, What the fuck is the point of going on, of trying? The anti-trans bills that are spreading like necrotic tissue all over the States right now are truly terrifying. Arguably the largest environmental catastrophe in US history, the train derailment and toxic spill in Ohio, is already old news except for those directly affected. We are assaulted by calamity coming at us from all sides.
I haven’t been reading Mary Oliver for half my life to ignore the deeper meaning in this ordinary, tender sprouting happening right outside my back door. The tree, despite its (to my human eye) dire straits, isn’t about to stop being about what a tree is about, which is to make leaves, to make life. To continue. To reach for places to root anew and to rise again. To keep trying.
I saw this meme on Insta that I wished I’d saved (if you happen to know which one I’m talking about please share!) that said something like, I’m gonna keep going trying to make a better world, I don’t care about the odds. And that’s the message that this tree is whispering to me: we keep going reaching and making life even in the midst of peril and death because that’s what we’re about, and fuck the odds. The odds don’t matter.
Naturally, searching for this meme landed me right in nerd territory, in the odds-defying rebel territory of Star Wars and Stranger Things, to that moment in season 4 where D&D-playing Dustin nods at Han Solo when he says, “Never tell me the odds.”
In the moment in each tale when the protagonist says, Never tell me the odds, them and their companions seem every bit as fucked as my hackberry tree limb. We keep telling these stories because these two bunches of underdogs did, in fact, beat the odds. Beating the odds makes for much more compelling–and enduring–storytelling. But these kinds of stories, the ones told after the victory has been secured, aren’t necessarily what healing is all about. Healing isn’t about making a good story. The healing is in the trying.
Nature is just so fucking punk rock, how it never gives a fuck about the odds. We’ve been so divorced from nature, as a people, for so long, and it feels like we’re almost out of time to collectively remember. But for those of us who are looking for some shred of hope for how we might keep on trying, how we might keep leafing out in the midst of catastrophe, some vital lessons are happening right outside our back door.
If I’m gonna go out–and we’re all going out, one way or another–I want to go out like this tree: my limbs torn and bleeding, my heart and flesh exposed, and yet still sprouting leaves from my fingers. Never tell me the odds because the odds aren’t what I’m about, what we’re about.
No matter the odds, may we never stop reaching for each other.
No matter the odds, may we never stop looking for new places to root.
No matter the odds, may we never stop making shelter from our limbs.
No matter the odds, may we never stop making the world beautiful with our leafing.
No matter the odds, may we never resign ourselves that this is the end of the story.
No matter the odds, may we never forget that new life is always possible.
No matter the odds, may we never stop trying.
No matter the odds, I will never stop rooting for you–for trans kids to become trans adults, for disabled and chronically ill folks, for neurodivergent folks, for Black and Brown and Indigenous and Jewish folks, for single moms, for undocumented workers. No matter the odds, I will never stop looking for beauty around me, and making more beauty in response. No matter the odds, I will never stop dreaming and resting and collaborating and resisting towards a better world.
READING
🌈 Enchantment by Katherine May
🌈 The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
🌈 Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
WATCHING
🌈 For horror fans: Significant Other
LISTENING
Shout out to Marika Heinrichs for the phrase and concept.
This was so beautiful! Thank you for this piece. Recently I've wondered what 'faith' I can develop to keep going. The faith is in the trying and the moving, as we see with these beautiful little buds.
Thank you for the reminder, Fanny.