Pruning

Every time I see those circular wounds in a tree where a branch was sawed off, I wince. I think of the brutal cut of the metal teeth; I think of the sorrowful sap bleeding. I see those holes as scars telling the story of the tree’s life, where it was hacked and hurt, how we all carry these places where a part of us was cut down for someone else’s purpose, by someone else’s idea of how our behavior or our journey should take shape.

I don’t take kindly to all this human intervention on the growth of a tree. It seems unnatural, an unnecessary interference. Most gardening activities seem so, to me – human effort forcing nature to cohere to an alien form. We snip at the bonsai constantly cutting it to conform to our whims. We fulfill our inner needs for control and order by weeding and bedding and mulching and seeding, digging up bulbs and turning them into refugees from their original dirt, committing genocide against species of boxwoods that don’t meet the criteria for our yard’s border.

Today, though, walking along the line of grey, de-limbed maples, I thought about how pruning can keep a plant healthy, and how, at least as a metaphor, the exercise of making choices, while painful, is necessary for a person’s character and talent to flourish.

Pruning Examples

My son buds forth a tendril tendency to whine, and I whittle at that shoot, so that it doesn’t stick around and turn into a main branch of his personality. It is not unpainful to detach.

My daughter expresses interest in talent in a variety of hobbies, from reading to dance to singing to acting to art to fashion to animals to science to activism. I help her focus on a few of these, so she can spend time and effort honing her skills, and it may hurt to give up as much time with the ones she decides are not her favorites.

In my own self, I realize that I have fallen into a pattern of resentment that I’d rather deny existed. It takes a lot of energy to uproot this very deep tendency. It doesn’t happen quickly. Even after the first extraction, I find it growing back, I didn’t get all of it. Part of me feels like I need that resentment, to hold me in place. I have to carefully watch for its return.

In the Garden

What we care for, water, attend to, feed grows. What we ignore dies. What we lop off might be missed. What we intend to escape might return. But we are always making those choices, even if we don’t realize it. We are always in the garden, and whether we actively pick up tools to consciously play a role in what survives or not, we are ultimately still responsible for what happens. If we let the weeds take over and choke all the gorgeous blooms out, if we let the invasive species crowd out the sun for the grass, the resulting landscape of dirt and stone devoid of beauty is our own doing.

The Middle Way (wu-wei)

There’s the Taoist middle road, of course, in how one approaches both personal and botanical growth. All child-raising and self-improvement does not have to take the extreme form of straight-jacket emotionally rigid attempts to make a person be something she is not and do things she does not like or have the propensity to perform.

And all gardening does not have to look like the operations of deforestation, intense logging, damaging farming practices, staid Victorian gardens. Caring for the survival and health of beautiful flowers and fruitful trees has its place, and can be more about clearing the space for what is naturally occurring to find abundance.

Natural is Not Always Good

I get really annoyed when people fall into the idea that “natural” is a value in and of itself. I mean, usually that is the case – your natural hair color is usually preferable to a dyed hot mess, for instance.

But in our pseudo-Buddhist tendencies (seen on Facebook posts that say things like, “Maybe we’re not supposed to learn so much as unlearn things to get to who we were originally”) we subscribe to the notion that growth, learning, thinking, etc. move us away from our infant-state of supposed wisdom, purity, godliness. We see babies as perfect beings who then fall from grace when they grow up and we fill them with education and information and ideas and they learn to think.

Babies may be perfect, but then, we all are. Because what makes a baby perfect isn’t anything but the fact that a baby just IS not much of anything, undeveloped, unrealized, just starting, and unable to survive on its own, babbling not talking… It may be true that we grow away from our childhood pastimes of playfulness and openness and body-feelings. But you know, that is not always bad. We do learn, and unlearn, and learn again, but that is okay. It’s ok to grow up and not play all the time. It’s ok to learn to think about other people. To learn to share. To learn how to articulate an argument, analyze a premise. These are not innate or natural practices. Loving others is something you learn.

A baby is not a Buddha. A buddha goes through a lot of learning to get to the place where he can be enlightened. The emptiness advocated by Buddhism is not born into. It can only be achieved in relationship to fullness. And it does not mean the absence of brain cells, cognition, intelligence.

A baby is perfect, you are perfect, inherently valuable, alive, significant, part of the whole. You make mistakes, you make terrible choices, you screw things up, but that is what learning is, that is what we do, we experience and learn, that is who we are, in pain and suffering and join, learning to trim away, wisely, to allow our hearts to grow as big as possible, with nothing in the way.

 

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 –

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.