On Mother Nature

Leyla Yilmaz

Cypress trees line the streets of Istanbul with their prickly leaves standing as straight as Alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, standing tall and giving way to divinity when God’s name is written. Individual leaves expand into snowflake-like patterns, holding the reminder of breathtaking nature and the love it houses. In the concrete city with loud street vendors, bazaars with red and green spices, and the red of the flag hang all over the high buildings, suspended in the exhaust, there are Cypress trees. A reminder of the roots of humanity. Of nature, of gentleness.

My mom brings me to a garden with cypresses and green soil once a week to escape the concrete and waste of the city. It’s good for the soul, she says, and when I caress the green snowflakes of their leaves and lift my hand to smell the whispers of lemon on it, I can feel pieces of my soul lifting and fitting themselves together like a broken puzzle.

My mother tells me how seeds and wood grow in the soil. Nature, the forgiving, gentle source, gives birth to the weeping willows, peonies, and the cypresses. A body pregnant to the fuel of the living and a home to the dead. Gentle, grounding, all-encompassing.

She tells me to take my socks off in the garden, that it’s good for my soul. I stretch my feet on the gentle ground and feel the dead, the living, the life under me in shreds. She gestures for me to walk, says the soil sucks the nerves out of me like a mother would suck out poison from her baby’s arm. Everything comes and returns to the soil, my mother says.

Walking along the soil, I think of how a man once told me that Adam was made from the gentle soil, and Eve was made from harsh bone. I think back to the soul my mom is so determined to heal, trapped within the bone of my body. I think of the screeching sound I hear that comes from it, echoing beneath my bones. That is what I am, I think. I am all bones, clinking against, creaking and smashing into each other, making a careful cage to contain its sin. I must be Eve’s daughter. If I was made of earth, it would suck the poison out of my body.

But I don’t say any of this to my mom standing on the brown of the earth. I walk silently along the cypresses, trying to feel the roots of the earth below. Ancient, breathing.