Good Neighbors Leave a Gap
In some forests the crowns of neighboring trees never touch. Thin channels of sky run between them, and no one knows exactly why.
Lie on your back in certain forests and look straight up, and you will see something odd. The crowns of the trees do not touch. Each one stops just short of its neighbor, and between them run thin, winding channels of sky, like rivers on a map. The leaves on one side reach toward the leaves on the other and stop, a hand's width apart, all the way around.
It has a name, crown shyness, and it has been seen in pines, in larches, in eucalyptus, in mangroves. What nobody has settled is why. One idea is that the branch tips rub each other raw in the wind and stop growing where they get hurt. Another is that the growing tips can sense the light bouncing off a neighbor's leaves and quietly stop before they get there. Both are probably partly true, and in some forests neither explains it. The scientists are honest about this: the trees leave the gap, and we are still not sure how they know to.
What is sure is what the gap does. Light gets through to the forest floor. Air moves. Disease has a harder time crossing from one crown to the next. The trees grow close, for decades, and never quite touch, and the forest is healthier for it.
Now think about the people closest to you
Set the canopy down and think about the person you are closest to, and the last time it felt like too much.
The mother who calls every day and is hurt by the days you do not pick up. The partner who wants to know what you are thinking, right now, every time. The friend who takes your silence as a verdict. Or you, on the other side: the one who cannot stand a closed door, who reads a gap as a goodbye. Most of us were taught that love means no gap. That close means touching. That if there is sky showing between you and someone you love, something has gone wrong.
Look up at the trees. They are as close as two living things can be. Their roots are tangled under the ground. Their crowns have grown side by side for a century. And at the very edge, where leaf meets leaf, they leave a hand's width of sky. Not because they are drifting apart. Because the gap is how both of them keep getting light.
Close is not the same as touching. The gap is where the light gets in.
Nobody knows why, and they do it anyway
I keep coming back to the part the scientists cannot explain. The trees do not have a reason they could give you. They are not keeping score or protecting themselves. Something in the growing tip simply knows: this close, and no closer, and the forest is better for it.
You probably know it too, and have been talking yourself out of it. The evening you need alone, the week you do not want to discuss the thing, the room in the house that is yours: you have been treating them as failures of love, and apologizing for them. They are the gap. They are not the opposite of being close. They are what makes being close survivable for a hundred years.
Buddha Groove carves a tree of life into a small wooden trivet, a thing whose entire job is to hold a space between a hot pot and the table. I like that the tree is the one keeping the gap.
Leave one gap
A small practice. This week, leave one gap on purpose, and do not apologize for it. An hour, an evening, a question you do not answer yet. Say it plainly if you need to: I am close, and I need a little sky. Then watch what the gap does. Usually the light gets through to both of you, and the thing you were afraid would be a goodbye turns out to be air.
Yesterday's essay was about waiting in the shade: small in the shade, waiting for the gap. Tomorrow's is about two trees joined into one, because the graft takes at the wound. The yin yang essays, which are about holding two things at once, are on their own page. This is one of a series of short essays on the tree of life.
Somewhere two pines that have stood side by side for ninety years are leaning toward each other in a wind tonight, and stopping, and leaning, and stopping.