Gnarled

I have torn both my ACLs playing basketball (not at the same time). I’ve broken my right wrist, broken my left pinkie, fractured my toe, torn my groin, had shingles, got a mallet finger when I fell off my bike (you can ride without hands but you must look at the road), to name a few of my physical wounds.

Then, there are the abundant emotional wounds. Jobs I prayed and prayed for and still didn’t get, loss of family members and friends, broken heart after broken heart.

For a long time I didn’t know what to do with all of it. And then I found a word for what a tree does: Gnarling.

Gnarling is an action a tree takes as it grows into itself, the action of twisting and contorting something into a knot or deformed shape. A gnarl in a tree is part deformation, part adaptation. It is formed when a tree experiences some calamity, when it loses a branch or gets an infection or develops a mutation, and then it grows around the old wound, which deforms the otherwise smooth flow. In some way, it can be read as a tree refusing to let go of its past. The oldest trees on earth, the bristlecone pines, are among the world’s most contorted and gnarled.

I love this. From what I knew of the world gnarly, was all the California kids saying it in skate culture. “Gnarly” comes straight from “gnarled.” It started as surf slang for a wave so big and twisted it could hurt you, and it kept both meanings at once: the danger and the achievement, the wound and the feat, fused in one word. A gnarly wave is a world of twists and turns you choose to ride anyway.

I choose to ride.

I think to live in a gnarled gnarly way is the art of dealing with bodily injury, but also mental and emotional and spiritual injury and loss and change. It is going with the curve of life, it’s a way to twist with life and not go against it. Contortion as thriving. Gnarling as adaptation and strength.

Yes, this is my physical body experience of not letting all my injuries stop me from moving and being active, but also my internal one - one day I think I am worthless, and then one day I think I am the Dominican Brad Pitt, and then one day I want to live in the cabins and be a monk, and one day I want to run around and sleep with as many people as possible, and then one day I want to do as many psychedelics as possible, and this - who and what am I conundrum goes on and on… and instead of having to choose, I ask myself, what if I twist these parts of me into my being? We think we need to let certain parts of us go, or we need to stay one way forever, that it’s part of getting old, but what if, like a tree, we grew older, which means we grew more gnarled into ourselves. We didn’t get rid of things or always had to pick and choose, we let them grow into us.

To think in a gnarled way, to think like a tree, to experience life like a tree, is to see the world as an ongoing pattern of persistence. Not defeat. A tree is a way of persisting in a world of wounds. That is how they outlive us and expand our sense of time. Each new layer of wood wraps around the old, around what we learned to live with, until we grow with our imperfections.

And this is the pattern of our life. We branch out, we take risks, we build community, we reach and we try. A tree keeps its wounds, the scar becomes part of the trunk. All the while we weather hardships like a tree. All the while we set down roots like a tree. This keeps us grounded for all the gnarling that is to come.

Stay gnarly.

Engaged Liberation is a labor of love.

But it is labor. If you love it, support it for less than $5/mo. Thank you!