self-portrait

Thelonius the monk lived in the hollow center of an old baobab tree. 

He tended bees, ate baobab leaves, and prayed the canonical hours, day by day, week by week, year by year.

He dressed in his only frock, a yellow one, for yellow was his favorite color, the color of the early morning sun, and wore his only pair of sandals, simple rubber ones, made of recycled tires, to keep his feet from scorching and breaking on the scalding, rocky ground.

He wrote at night by the fire beside his tree. 

It was a good time and place to write. 

It helped him remember that writing is a light against the darkness, a way to help people listen.

He was alone, but he wasn’t lonely. 

The loneliness birds came and laid stone eggs in his heart. 

But he was friends with the trees, friends with the bees, friends with the people, and friends with God. 

When he was looking for a tree in which to make his home, he saw some beautiful trees. 

They seemed to be tended in a garden. 

But he chose a very ugly tree.

It was old, misshapen, and broken, one that was dying away. 

He hollowed out the trunk of that tree and made his home in the heart of it. 

A miracle happened there. 

In his first year of living in that tree, it sprouted more leaves than any other tree in the land, so many leaves that it looked as if it were a brush stroke of the greenest of greens on an artist’s palate. 

It produced an unending source of baobab fruit for everyone near and far.

He tended the bees that lived in his tree, and the bees tended him.

The bees made honey in the branches of the tree. 

He climbed the tree and took the honey out of it’s holes with his bare hands and never received a single sting. 

It was as if the bees made the honey just for him. 

He stood in front of his tree and raised his left hand and the bees came down from their work, lit on his face, and buzzed a hymn to God.

He ate the leaves and fruit from his baobab tree and this, along with the honey, was the whole of his diet. 

Each morning he scraped the fuzz off the shell of the fruit, cracked the shell with a stone, pulled out the white, sweet and sour fruit, placed it in his iron pot of water over fire, boiled it until the fruit separated from it’s marble sized seeds, removed the seeds with a small cotton net, and dipped out the drink with a clay mug. 

Each afternoon, just before prayers, he crushed leaves from the branches of the tree in his mortar with his pestle and, after his prayers, would eat the baobab salad until he was full. 

Each evening, he added a cup of honey as a dressing to the salad and ended the day with a sweet taste on his tongue. 

Because of the vitamin A in the young baobab leaves, he could see amazingly well.

He prayed for people. 

“This is my vocation,” he thought, the why of why he was there. 

For him, prayer was holding people in his heart, much like the tree held him in it’s heart. 

He brought the people into himself and let them stay there for awhile, offering them a place to be heard. 

Together they would find God in the stillness of the tree and the silence of the heart. 

He prayed this way for each of the seven canonical hours of the day, for people who would come to the tree, and even for people who would never come to the tree.

He healed people. 

His heart went out to them. 

One morning, he heard a meek voice at the door of his tree.

“Please, help me.”

He sat on the boulders in the courtyard around his tree and listened as she told him of her painful journey over rocky roads and high hills. 

He understood her when he saw her grotesquely shaped left foot, large and layered, like the foot of a full grown elephant. 

He watched a tear roll off her cheek and splash onto her elephantine foot, baptizing it in sadness. 

He took some of the baobab fruit, crushed it in his mortar, splashed three drops of water on it, and anointed her foot in faith, hope and love. 

He wept. 

As she lumbered away, she knew she had been healed, even though he elephantine foot remained the same.

He only had one frock and one pair of sandals because he learned from the one who had no place to lay his head. 

The less he had, the less he needed. 

He washed his clothes before he laid down to sleep and donned them when he rose to begin his new day. 

During tierce, the 3 a.m. prayers, he wore nothing at all. 

He sat naked and remembered that God saw him just as he was.

He writes by a fire beside his tree tonight. 

As the smoke rises up and loses itself in the blackness and brilliance of the starry night, he hopes his words settle down on the whiteness and emptiness of the page and lose themselves in stories.

- trevor scott barton, stories for a brown-eyed girl, 2020