For the Love of Trees
In the ravine I see the red brick of the high school, the one I’d hoped to be working at this Monday morning as a substitute teacher to make up for the money I’ve been spending on hundred-dollar-hiker’s and Velvet Underground C.D.’s. The call this morning did not come either, just as it hadn’t when I applied for the permanent social studies position after student teaching within their walls. Church and state crossed in complicated ways, not unlike the rest of my history, I don’t even care to get into again.
Today, I took my walk in reverse so that I wouldn’t have to wait for the man walking ahead of me with the giant white dog—or shove past him and have Angel poop, and me with no clean-up bag. So, at the trees I walked in an opposite direction than I normally do and remembered in my mind the way they once looked—the big green leaves and the sun shining through them and the mostly hemlock woods. They had elephant looking bark and trunks and stood like two ancient, visiting sentinels marking a division of two unseen realms. Once there, you were out of the woods and back to the safety of watchful old people in sprawling-drived homes, those perched atop the hill with open views of the bridge.
I tell myself it is okay that I think of how the trees once were, just as I remember the two of us laughing and drawing at Shively Park, but when I look back and see the reality no longer matches the dancing lights of memory, but shows what has been sawed away, I decide the books of remembrance will not save us either.
Flashback photo of me & my favorite tree in the urban, Cathedral forest.
sad but true story and good memories are always there when you need a bit of a pick me up......nothing ever stays the same. even trees.
What a beautiful forest photo. I'm sorry you have such sad (or perhaps frustrating?) memories to write about today.
Do memories trail away vaporously? Ariadne teaches us they are a ball of yarn, and by unravelling it we reach the monster safely (with the option of return). Where do we go when we roll the yarn back up? Into the present? Back out of the future where all memory clouds?
Pychics don't need memory: when their loved ones die they check in with them directly. The memories then are only like snap shots reminding you in your busy day to remember them. But then why bother at all? A small courtesey to the lonely ones who have no minds to unwind?
What if we forget everything (like Zen promotes, and Alzheimer's forces)? Where do the memories go? (I am convinced they lead lives of their own - beyond the brain. But how and where and for how long....)
Yes, leading lives of their own that continue on possibly forever in the way(s) in which they mold our own lives and those who come into our lives, changing the trajectory of the next generation of memories, the next lives and the way in which they then live according to the memories not only shared, but carried on in our genetic codes. Perhaps, the unspoken are even more powerful as the unexplored holds so much energy?
Why Jung attempted to write it all out--go into the shadowy depths in order to find a rebirth. In this sense, perhaps Zen thinking is a cop out? A way in which to avoid the suffering and the believe that one can rise above the cruciFIXion of living?
My train of thought exactly! Amazing to read it back like this.
To live is to pin dead images. To ressurrect is to re-member all that is love; to make a love-body (love being a force that can extend into the future, since it only ever is in the present continuous ( a future tense: I am going, I am cooking a meal to eat later, I am breathing - also after this last exhalation...).
The coming six months, I shall be invitingall the unspoken to discover what turns up.
I am excited for you and all that you'll discover--REALLY excited and not just saying it in the rote way we so often do when someone embarks on a journey. I feel my breath quicken and heart beat a bit faster, like you are standing at the end of a high, diving board and I am next in line behind you!
Feel your breath. Not sure if it's in my neck, though.
:) I imagine we're both making those leaps of faith you suggest.