Shannon Baker

Having grown up along the North Shore of Lake Superior, Shannon Baker has always felt most at home in the outdoors. Now, living in central Iowa, she still draws inspiration from the wild spaces around her to create stories and poetry bent on transmitting messages of hope, joy, and redemption that is ever-present in the natural world. When she’s not writing, Shannon enjoys reading, kayaking, hiking, traveling, picking away at guitar or fiddle, connecting with people, and dreaming of ways to visit all the national parks. Her other poems and stories appear in Plain China: National Anthology of the Best Undergraduate Writing and elsewhere. You can read more of Shannon’s stories and poetry on her website: https://shanbake13.wixsite.com/shannon-baker.

aN Excerpt from “The Sycamore”

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

~ Mark 8:36 

Out beyond the sycamore tree is where the men would go to lose their souls. There was no specific place, no marking—not even an upturned clod of grass along the banks of the river or a fossilized boot print in the deep, red clay—nothing, nothing at all that would give a passing sojourner pause, that would make them think, here, here is where it happened. Here is where the men beat the odds and lost it all.

Like the earth, the river is quiet. The sycamore, too. It stands tall and old, mottled bark peeling in places, leaves broad and canopied, casting shade on the river grasses. The wind passes through the green, whooshing, but the tree stays silent. What happened is done; what more can be said? Volition is a terrible, beautiful thing.

Once or twice, a man was on his way to out beyond the sycamore but stopped. Instead, he climbed the sycamore to see better. His feet scraped the red-and-white bark of the sycamore, which hoisted him up to the highest branches. The leaves danced in soft breezes that day, joining the chatter of passing crowds. Branches were broken in the man’s hasty descent, but the sycamore only felt the promise of renewal. Those days were good, when it was climbed, when its branches shed both bark and wisdom and it was more than just a monument to things of old. When it was climbed for truth and not passed for profit.

As time went by, however, fewer and fewer stopped to climb the sycamore. Their hands would graze its peeling trunk, brushing the red-and-white wood with wistful fingers, almost as if their souls knew what they were about to do before they did. Which, in most cases, was quite true—and the sycamore always felt a tremor through its trunk, passed along by their touch: the internal war of the soul versus the man. But volition is a terrible, beautiful thing, and it is Man’s, not Nature’s, to decide what to do with.

Read more Shannon’s work in her full-length, illustrated novella, When the Mountains Called, and read more of “The Sycamore” in Solum Journal Volume III.