Cutting the Trees?

I heard that the cops want the trees cut down so they can see into the park better. You know, for security purposes.

A friend of mine went ballistic when I told her. “Why don’t those donut-eating hogs get OUT OF THEIR CARS?” she asked.

I have never seen a cop car driving past, an officer squinting into the park. I’ve not seen that many police cars at all.

And really, the trees shouldn’t have to pay for such a thing.

Adoption

Today I contacted the City about officially adopting the park.

The response:

Thanks for your inquiry to adopt Forest Hills Park, as you may know the Park is in it’s final stages of planning for revisions to the Park. Unfortunately the revisions will be on hold due to current budget restrictions in the City. In the mean time Park adoption usually includes trash pick-up, (which you kindly already do) mulching landscaped areas, simple weeding etc. You may wish to only do a targeted task such as trash pick up. We can provide bags, gloves and a trash picker as we don’t recommend handling trash. At the point when plans for renovation of the Park are possible there will be many lovely landscaped areas to oversee and water when necessary. If you wish to continue on in your present capacity it would be greatly appreciated just let me know. When future plans begin there will be many more interesting tasks at hand and certainly your involvement will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

This is swell. But I cannot imagine myself with gloves and a trash picker.

Recently I’ve been bemoaning my age – I see the wrinkles around my eyes and realize that the good ole Ravages of Time have begun their necessary tasks to take me down, and I’ve been having visions of myself as an Old Lady – sucked dry like a hunk of beef jerky on a late-night infomercial, sitting tidily in my translucent box, happy to oblige the hungry, younger generations their need to preserve me and then chew me into pieces as a midafternoon snack.

But gaw, that’s still all in my imagination – a trash picker would really seal the lid on the tupperware deal. I’m all for eccentricity, but I’m already earning Neighborhood Goof title by singing out my buoyant, geeky Hello!s to the boys in the hoods. Give me a trash picker and gloves from the City and any aspirations I yet maintain to blend in will be trampled… and picked and bagged and tossed, like all the other litter awaiting its fate in the wintering grass…

I remember when I was about 12 I promised myself that, unlike all the other adolescents I’d read about /witnessed, I wasn’t going to fall victim to the illusion of immortality, ride high on any kind of faith in safety from my vulnerable human state.

But I did; not because I forgot about my promise, but because death not only feels remote and far away – something to worry about in what seems to be the very distant future – but there’s a weird trap that opens up in your mind, an argument that forms that says you are not like other unfortunate souls who suffer an early demise – you do so easily wrap yourself in an odd, demented sense of immunity…

As I get older, and the things that seemed so far in the future occur, smacking me silly with the flat hand of Time, I listen to my grandmother, for instance, talk about her loneliness, and I think, darn it, darn it, it’s all going to end in tears. Her brothers and sisters are dead, her husband is dead, and her best friend is so deaf they can’t talk on the phone the five times a day they have done their entire lives.

I can’t run away from it, aging, and death. But I can save the trash picker for the lonely times when eccentricity is all I’ve got. For now, I’ll pick up trash on the downlow and thrash out the end of my youth like it’s a mosh pit… you know… rage against the dying of the light… at least until it’s time to do tai chi and wear comfortable pants and then, however wrinkly and bereft I’ve become, I’ll have the trees to be with, because the City is leaving them up for now, and I’ll go before they come down.

That’s my hope, at least. The hope I’ve adopted.

pen park

today in the park
of moss thickening and fog rising
to the occasion of our grey star
everything falling apart
damply, calmly, without protest
against the frost’s definitiveness

i knew it would be easier to be empty,
the cold offers the comfort
of the hard ground – but what is it

about this desire that it fights
for its own existence so strongly, even
when it will surely never find its
object? giving in, all would be peace.
clinging, the chaos.

though, to be honest, this wanting
under the shameless trees and the crisp moon
on the cusp of a darkness – it is its own solace,
a kind of company to keep,
a warmth between my hands, standing
in for you -

and it will do -
it must, it has to -

taking the park inside…

Autumn Mobile

maple trees: two

maple flaring

I’ve not been a fan of maple trees.

How can anyone confess such a thing?!

But their shapes, so easy to identify, seem too easy; they seem like the Sears brand of tree, kind of generic, servicable, ubuitous. The five fingers of their leaves so much like hands, waving around saying “we’re a metaphor! use us!”

I promise, this isn’t a kind of snobbery-induced distaste, though – the Sears/Walmart aesthetic repulses and frightens me – particle board bookshelves terrify -

My parents – oh children of the sixties – stored their heavy books with the adaptable-modular ‘bricks and board’ method – but at least they were real, raw materials -

I don’t mind, in fact I relish, fakeness and pretense when they are self-aware – acknowleding theselves – owning up to their superficiality by making it concretely excessive – drag queens, for instance – taking real to the limit -

When a bookshelf is faked to look ‘real’ with no admitting of the pretense, it degrades the ‘real’ object it is mean to simulate or evoke because it implies that the ‘real’ can be imitated/faked and therefore is, itself, superficial – fakeable – without a substantial value – a stripping of integrity – disconcerting on several levels -

It’s like when I worked at Peebles my senior year in high school, having to dust the “furniture” of the men’s department where I worked – the hollow desks and wardrobes, meant to look expensive, rich, but really just set pieces – if they had lived on a real theater stage, they would have worked – but providing atmosphere to pants and sportcoats cheapened the store and the world they were meant to evoke -

Oh, it’s all so silly. And so is my annoyance toward maple trees.

maple trees: one

unleaffed tree

We go to the park and – oh my goodness – our maple tree is naked.

“Our maple tree lost all its leaves,” I say. It’s a tiny tree standing sentry-like, right at the beginning of the park. It’s still got a loop of rope around its neck – like it escaped a hanging. Like it’s been leashed, but ran off, is still running. We always pass it – and the last time we did it was still in the thralls of being fantastic and red red red, belligerently. The stripped sight is slightly shocking.

“Our tree?” My daughter asks.

Her question is apt, and it makes me think yes – no – yes, because we pay attention to this maple tree, we pay a kind of homage, darsan to it, like entering a temple and bowing to the doorway goddesses, dipping our fingertips to the cool edges of a holy pool.

(So many goddesses hold up temples with their bare hands – literally arches carved with their arms – holding everything together- )

Is love ownership? I love you, we say to the beloved. You are mine.

Yesterday I heard the Flamenco singer Concha Buika say this:

“I sing against emotional dictatorships,” she says, “and against the imposition of one person over another, in the name of love.”

Yet, when we love, we make a claim – our love claims – we declare ourselves – and the beloved, she or he, sometimes is treated like a deserted island, a flag stuck through her throat…

But this love we offer this maple tree that makes me instinctively call it ours, it is saying that this tree is within our hearts, an echoing space within the temple has been created, and this is why love and art are so tightly joined, because to worship-adore-just notice and respond to person- object – idea with art-movement – piece is to enter into a conversation in which we are honoring the occurence of beauty with our own attempt to capture – is that the word? – to express our own incited joy -

And this is something like what I told my daughter when one day we were in the park and talking about art, and why people make pictures, and then why do other people want to see them.

Because there is beauty in the world, and we want to reciprocate, and offer beauty in return, a form of worship, an entering into, a collaboration -

what I said was simple, at the time, and perfect; and lost.

No, not ownership, oppression; but yes, a claim. It is our maple tree, because our love for it, our attention, has claimed it as part of our landscape, our inner territory of the cared for, the garden we tend. The inner Eden.

Lord, I get gushy over trees.

leaves, leaving

The leaves fall, fall as if from far away…
And through the night the heavy earth falls too,
down from the stars, into the loneliness.
And we all fall. This hand must fall.
Look everywhere: it is the lot of all.
– from Rilke’s “Autumn”

This is what the leaves teach us:

To preserve is not to live.

(someone says under her breath: take a look at a mummy, dummy)

You can’t save them. They fall and fall, ignited colors, red, fuschias, oranges, golds – leaves striped and swirled and pockmarked with the handwriting of disease – my throat constricts with desire to hold them, to consume them into my body, to shallack them, to keep them, make them stay exactly as they are, so over-the-top gorgeous -

but, as a pocket in my pocketbook attests, leaves drain of their color and crumple into papery flakes. The glory cannot be saved.

The art preservationists pipe in at this point, to protest their worth, the aching hours of time they spend restoring and maintaining Great Works of Art, the air so hungry to eat away at the painted genius on the chapel ceilings…

And the monks sifting colored sand into wispy mandalas -

I am enough of a child of the Western World to want to explain why Art exists, why we want it to persist.

Word association takes me to preserves – to canning. My mother’s shelves.

And I think: certainly, nothing we attempt to Keep Forever will. However, like peaches or tomatoes, blanched and prepared to last way past their natural edible prime, we have developed the skills to keep some things for later, for when we need them. Food, of course; art as well – beauty, that is. And experience of.

Not all things. And not forever.

A picture of fallen leaves is a way to preserve their shape and color till and through and past the winter.

Still, the picture itself will fade and follow the disintegration. We all go the way of the leaves.

leaves

But that is life. That is living. Living is change, change includes dissolution, dying. We know this. The opposite of life is not death but stilled life (- a Still Life – art not life? -) preservation – Snow White in the glass case; a frozen cryogenic head; the waxed bagel. Clinging to the version of the thing we love in one form, not accepting it will become another.

Not accepting that the monk, the wind, will take a breath.

And we will feel it. Cool and sure.

And we will fall away.

Darlings

I made a conscious effort with my children to call them My Darlings.

I love the word “darling.” I find it darling. (Add a syllable and it’s a kind of tea.)

And yes, I did swipe it from Peter Pan.

Anyway, unlike other attempts at an idealistic grace painted in full Disney color, this one seems to be a reality, as today, in the park, my daughter went up and down the slide with her doll, whom she was calling Darling!

I’m coming for you, Darling!

I’ll rescue you, Darling!

Darling, here we go!

As I heard her address her little purple friend in this manner, all the sweetness and tenderness I feel for my girl slid forth from the rocky parts of my heart.

The trees were black and yellow, grey and saffron, etchings of charcoal sparkling with glitter.

“Sadness, in this context, is not the opposite of happiness. The opposite of happiness is a closed heart. Happiness is a heart so soft and so expansive that it can hold all of the emotions in a cradle of openness. A happy heart is one that is larger at all times than any one emotion.”

- Elizabeth Lesser, The Seeker’s Guide

This, I feel, is the essence of autumn. Loss and beauty colliding, colluding together to make our hearts beat faster, and live.

Turning Cartwheels

When I was 8, I lived in London with my family; one of our favorite haunts was, of course, Hyde Park.

Grass

Well, one day I was doing cartwheels there, goofily, gaily, galloping head over heels, when smush! one hand landed in the center of a large pile of horse manure.

If you have been to Hyde Park, you know how large it is, how hard it can be to find a place to wash one’s soiled hand. If you’ve seen horse manure, you know how large that is, too. I felt utterly debased.

Such an episode does not bode well for me and the park, does it?

Or does it tell something about the nature of – well, nature? And life?

And then there was the time I was 6 and singing happy birthday to myself, just skipping along in glee, and a bee flew into my wide open mouth and stung the tender roof, flew out, and died.

I can still taste the flavor of that sting.

I am thinking now about all the precautionary measures we are warned to take to avoid pain and hurt and accidental demise with our children, ourselves – every thing posits a possible danger, it seems.

And also a possible treasure – a possible pleasure – a possible delight, no? Can you imagine if the headlines read, “Beware – that seemingly innocuous heap of leaves could mean an hour of thrilling crunching if you’re not careful – walk at your own risk”?

Perhaps the lesson is: Cartwheel and sing your song.

If you land in crap or eat a bee, you will recover.

Take delight where you find it. Scoop it up in big heaping handfulls. Don’t cut back out of fear. You’ll miss the fun – the drama – the story – don’t live a safe, dull life.

That reminds me of how one of my favorite poets, Frank O’Hara, died: In a dune buggy accident at a very young age. My first reaction on reading that was to think, “What an idiot!” (It’s always easier to think someone an idiot and thus make oneself immune to the very same outcome – I, of course, would never subject myself to such a silly expiration escapade, would I?) My second reaction was a sincere desire to go back in time as the Angel of the Future and warn Frank to avoid moving vehicles.

But seriously, he was living his life. Death is not strange. Pain is not aberrant. Poo and bees and dune buggys are part of the experience.

Sometimes, as the bumper sticker, shit happens. But I hate that bumper sticker, and it’s sister, “Life’s a bitch.” Sometimes, I want to say, just like I want to say to the Buddha: Okay, yeah, Life is suffering, sometimes. Maybe more or less depending on where you live and your personal outlook, but yeah, okay, but yeah, no, not totally.

Life includes suffering and joy, and we need to take both lightly, and fully, honoring both, for they make up who and what we are.

I wonder about that noble truth a lot.

The trees, of course, don’t need to wear bumper stickers.

They just extend to the sun, to the clouds, to the lightning. They don’t flinch. They are static cartwheels, grounded in the motion of being.

Branches in sun

Into the Woods/Into the Wild

So, I’m aware that the title of this blog has its possible echoes.

1. Into the Woods, musical by Stephen Sondheim – one of my favorites – fairytales interwoven into one big metaphoric mass about the adventure of living. We go into the woods, the wild and dangerous and dark places, to find danger and magic, solutions and dissolutions.

The show covers multiple themes: growing up, parents and children, accepting responsibility, morality, and finally, wish fulfillment and its consequences.^[14] William A. Henry III wrote that the play’s “basic insight… is at heart, most fairy tales are about the loving yet embattled relationship between parents and children. Almost everything that goes wrong — which is to say, almost everything that can — arises from a failure of parental or filial duty, despite the best intentions.”^[15] Stephen Holden writes that the themes of the show include parent-child relationships and the individual’s responsibility to the community. The witch isn’t just a scowling old hag but a key symbol of moral ambivalence. She is also the only character in the show who always tells the truth. James Lapine said that the most unpleasant person (the witch) would have the truest things to say and the “nicer” people would be less honest. In her words, “I’m not good; I’m not nice; I’m just right.”[

I love the idea that so many fairytales involve a traipse through the woods – where our heroines encounter witches who offer candy, fantasy, escapism – but for Sondheim, they offer truth. I wander our park – do I truth-tell? Will I have my own family dynamics playing out on the jingling swingset?

Maybe not – “the park” is such a domesticated area – landscaped, mowed, conceptualized, planned. It is not a Wild Space. Or is it? Is it a human zoo of sorts? An old-fashioned commons? It is outmoded and unused now that people frequent cafes with wireless, coffee shops, video arcades, or just stay stuck in their homes? What is the point of a park these days? A place to exercise – exercise the dog at the dog park, exercise the kids at the playground – but what is there for us adults?

Why aren’t there more people doing tai chi in them?

2. Into the Wild. The book, the movie, both of which I consumed this past summer. The storyline of a young guy who graduates from college and then disappears to pursue ever more dangerous excursions into raw natural experience – the last of which kills him – what fascinated me about the story (book more than the movie) was the notion that the guy didn’t seek a lot of knowledge before going at his various adventures – he tried to rely on instinct – scrambling – making it up as he went along – meeting the wilds of the desert or of Alaska with just himself, not even the proper maps… foolish, and yet, I understand that sense of – purity?

I take my daily walks into the park without fear of moose, snake, or caribou. The most dangerous animal I’ll come across is someone’s untrained, unleased pitbull; perhaps a rabid squirrel will tempt my dog into a frenzy I can’t contain, and he’ll scamper into the boundaries of brush where I can’t find him.

I am not a mountain climber. Still, there are times when social anxiety kicks in, and I feel an icy precipice intercepts me and the strangers I come across on the green lilting slopes.

Stranger Phobia
More often than not, the stranger is friendly. A woman in a flowery, fiery red dress – “Five bucks at Roses!”; kids who want to pet the dog – “Does he bite?”; a woman also walking a stubborn dog…

If I were the kind of person to believe that We are All One, I would find each encounter an exercise – not of the muscle – but of the spiritual imagination. To identify each person, however hostile or distant he or she seems to be upon my initial appraisal – as not a stranger but another aspect of the same energy/life force / universe/ family that is mine – to treat him as if he were a long-lost brother, a newfound sister, to extend my arms, even if only with my eyes – this is my challenge, because we live in such a large society that is fractured and broken by its very profound size and the nature of our history together -

I read the Bible several times while I was growing up. And though I don’t treat the Bible with the same reverence I once did, I do still have verses that remain important.

“In perfect love there is no fear.” This is one I remember and think of, especially dealing with strangers, with the fear of The Other. To acknowledge our common humanity to love another person is to not fear that person.

In an industrialized society, fear is a survival mechanism imbued into our daily interactions. But is it truly as rational as we might think?

Promises, Promises
When I was 12, I remember I made a solemn promise with myself. I had noticed that adults did not look each other in the eyes when passing by one another. Instead, they deflected notice, they turned glances aside, they squinted. Me, I wasn’t afraid of looking right at another person and smiling – I was 12 years old, I believed I was a good, holy person, and I believed that others were, too. I had the protection of my sincere faith in goodness radiating around me like the fringe of an ecstatic aura. I told myself I would never ever stop looking people in the eyes. No matter how old I got.

But I failed my 12-year-old self. I did start cringing, at least with my lashes. Bending them over. Peeking through. Avoiding the stares and glances and peeks of others as we crossed paths on the sidewalks of the city. Feigning distraction. Looking at the cracks on the ground with intense pretend interest.

Some of this was the fault of people like the guy who wagged his tongue at me out his car window one night when I was going home from a college anthropology course. There are mean and attacking people out there who will take a trusting contact of the eye and turn it into an opportunity to hurt.

But if we are all one – or at least, we are all aspects of the whole – how can we not love, offer compassion, to the ridiculous and sweetness-starved individuals who would try to turn the brief coincidence of passing by into a moment of attrition?

Perfect love is the Buddhist loving-kindness, is the wide-open embrace of the universal mother who will take us all back, eventually.

And you can find this rich accepting stance – those open arms – at the base of any tree – in the metaphoric woods, the mythic wilds, and even in the – in my – city park.