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.