Breaking the silence, breaking the cold

These past two weeks have been silent, I know.

Silent, blog-wise, but not silent here. The sounds in our home have been anything but pleasant: sneezing, nose-blowing, cough cough cough coughing. But today, that is finally changing, thanks to what I will have to call My Healing Tree.

Long ago, at a point when I was filled with a grief so harsh I felt completely lost, I took comfort in the arms of one of the cedars in our yard. Weaving my way through the fronds, almost to the centre -- the trunk -- of the tree, I pretty much collapsed into the branches. Without complaint, those branches cradled me, supporting me firmly enough that they kept me from falling to the ground. They held me and kept me safe while I wept myself dry, a turning point in healing from the sadness I'd been overfilled with.

And last night, this same tree offered help again.

Blustery. A Winnie-the-Pooh word for the sort of night it was. But when I woke in the night, I felt that I was being called. Opening the front door, the branches of the cedar seemed to be reaching out to me. This time the branches were whipping in frenetic bursts of wind, but it was a wind that was filling me with sharply scented air, offering what felt like a cleansing for my lungs.

I can only trust that the neighbours weren't watching as I stood outside on the deck, taking in huge gulps of air that seemed to be pulling phlegm and spew from me. I cast it out in spasms of coughing, projectile sputum hurtled into darkness. How long this went on, I'm not even sure.

But finally, once back inside, I managed to sleep. A deep sleep, one that was filled with dreams of summertime, swimming and light. And somehow buried in those dreams, I was handed a vial containing a precious essence. It was small, and in a container that reminded me of the slim darkened glass ampoules of royal jelly I used to buy from the Chinese store.

But this one, singular, held what I was told I needed: cedar oil.

So today I selected tips from the tree, the greenest and freshest ones. Snipped them into a pot and brewed a tea. Tenting myself over the pot, I breathed in the foresty steam, held it deep and long. Then took the smallest cup of it, sipping and taking in its vapours until it was gone.

Almost immediately, I could feel the clearing in my chest. What I had pictured as white fungus (like the white mould that might grow on the soil of a fouled houseplant) inside of me was now gone.

While this sounds as though I must still be well in the grip of fever dreams, I can only say that an Internet search for cedar oil has only suggested caution -- not to drink very much of it, so I am paying attention and doing that. But I also see that indeed cedar oil has, among a number of its other uses, the clearing of fungus.

So maybe the crossover between dream world and reality isn't as great as we may sometimes think, especially when there's a healing tree that serves as a messenger between those two worlds.