Wake of the Flood, Laughing Waters

 

Twilight. Fading light. Another day is closing out.  I can hear the birds, they chirp and trill. The light is warm but the air is not. It is neutral and for tonight that is okay. Too much cold and too much ambiguity over whether to march onto into spring or hold on dearly to winters cloak have made the months of April and May irritating.  Save resilient daffodils these months have not shown the spark of joy the changing of the seasons should bring.

I read a chapter on acceptance and mercy written by a psychologist. Lying in my hammock the words made so much sense.  The author talked about a poisonous tree.  When we such a tree thought is to cut it down, to burn it or to otherwise dispatch it.  But the tree might have some other value in the ecosystem that we don’t yet understand.  Perhaps fencing the tree and labeling it so as to warn others might be the way to go.  Acceptance and mercy.  It doesn’t mean that we let the poison take us, it means that we try and act with growing understanding and compassion.

Having read that section, I rousted myself from my comfortable hammock and walked.  As I stepped outside my house the light on a budding tree caught my eye.  Quickly I snapped a number of shots.  One was easier than the other’s to frame.  One taken I adjusted the color.  Funny thing was that one of the filters made the tree look the shade of an old Grateful Dead recording, Wake of the Flood. As I looked at the end result it made me smile.  I remember so much of my life that the songs on that album were the soundtrack for. 

Ah the light grows dim.  I will stop my writing now.

Friday, May 06, 2016

Sun and light haze today. The air is not yet warm.  Breakfast was out because I had forgotten to make oatmeal last night.  If you don’t plan you pay. Some time was spent cleaning up the kitchen before the trip off to the place for the morning meal. If you don’t act you pay.

Breakfast was as breakfast mostly is oatmeal.  Dried apples garnished it.  A pinch of brown sugar sweetened it.  A couple of pecans made it savory.  Coffee washed it down.  

The short walk from the breakfast place to my office showed me two things.  First humankind always seems to have a plan for anything in nature that seems unused or under used.  Maybe builders have a mantra, “build higher, build denser, reduce the cost per square foot and maximize the profit of rental units”. Cranes are popping up a nine story building where there used to be a couple of pole barns and a large parking lot. The construction I saw going on is a striking change to a landscape that has remained relatively stable for 40 years.

Second nature always puts on a show.  I took a photograph of a tree covered with white blossoms last Friday.  Today all the white blossoms are on the ground browning in decay.  However the tree’s canopy now appears golden from all the little stems apparently covered with pollen (or some kind of residue) that remain from the points where the blossoms had previously been.  Life is a parade of change.

The final thing I notice today is that our leaders are weak and rely on their biases and our fears to rule.  One headline after another in a paper abandoned at the table I sat at focused on punishments being enacted against marginalized groups. Why because the people we elected don’t like the color of their skin or the cadence of their voices. You could almost hear the terms lazy and shiftless hidden in the rhetoric. There was no problem solving, no statesmanship. All that was there was retribution for perceived wrongs of 40 years past.

God if you are ever oppressed and economically abused don’t ever riot.  Fifty years later and tired old white people are still trying to exact revenge.

What Is Beyond These Trees?

 

In the course of a day I make two or maybe three trips to the nearby coffee shop.  To get there a follow a path that takes me through a parking lot. At the end of the lot there is a berm that is comprised of spread stone on one side, a divider of 8 foot tall scrubby trees, pine or yew or some other ornamental and then on the other side a strip of mulch. 

 You cannot see the coffee shop through the natural fence as it were.  You can however see the opening in the shrubs.

Each time I walk through that green canopy I wonder about the other times I have approached a copse of trees or a woodlot and have seen a clear path worked through the natural arches formed by the tree’s branches.  

The first time I see a path like that I wonder what lies inside the wood, what lies beyond the wood.  Maybe some people just see the path and dismiss it. Me, I am always intrigued.

I guess some of my intrigue comes from a youthful experience when I went with my parents to pick up my siblings from a church camp.  At the camp there was a stand of scrubby pine.  As a young lad I wandered off into those fragrant pines. In a clearing in the middle there was a tiny chapel hardly bigger that a tool shed.  It was painted white inside and out and had a door that was ajar.  Looking inside there in a space that was six by six there was red carpet on the floor. A small cross was nailed to the wall opposite the door and standing before it was a kneeler for prayer.  I had never seen anything like it.  It was a holy place hidden away deep in the trees. God lived in a small hut in the woods.

After that I frequently followed the trails I saw running under the verdant foliage. As the years have gone on I have found party spots with empty beer cans and used rubbers near a large puddle deep inside the trees.  I have found honest to goodness Zen gardens. I have found a path that led to the wire fence that prohibited me from wandering onto the freeway as a pedestrian.  Sometimes I have simply walked through the woods and come out the other side at the edge of green fields or flowering fields or at the back of tract housing. On one walk through the woods I came upon five waters falls.  I later learned that there are seven if I had only just kept going the extra mile or so.  

Maybe the path through the trees is a metaphor for life.  Maybe I am just looking for the mystery at the center of all that surrounds me. As long I keep walking I will keep following these paths.

  Oh and there was that one time when the bear sat blocking the path. Another metaphor for life.