Spring: On Resonance and Dissonance
Field Notes IV.XIII: Reflections on flowers and the yearning for more
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A cherry tree stands in my front lawn, a venerable and noble sentinel before the seasons. Though some branches die and fall to the ground in winter storms, this tree has endured here since long before I’ve lived here and I’ve now been here long enough to see my children come into this world and grow to young adults and begin to leave our home on their own, so for a generation of man. Those years raced by like clouds on a windy day.
Over the years I’ve come to know this tree, who holds his post like a doorman to my domicile and yet somehow more accurately it is me who has been assigned as his caretaker for two decades. And so we’ve become friends. While it seems like we’ve just now escaped the threat of winter weather and of more hard freezes, the springtime offers a non sequitur of temperatures and in the afternoons I sweat. In that afternoon light I notice the blossoms beginning to grace the branches of the cherry tree.
Spring has already come and as soon as I perceive these blossoms I know what follows, because the tree and I are friends and have learned each other’s temperaments. The blossoms will erupt with unimaginable exuberance, a luminous display of delicate white. And it will be gone in just a couple of days’ time, an ephemeral dream.
So it goes. I watch the explosion walking my dogs. One day it rains. Later, the sun is setting, but the light still filters through the blossoms and its all so very vibrant and so very sad because I cannot ask it to remain any longer than it does, until my impetus for creativity returns.
My better camera rests on my desk, either recovering or collecting dust, I cannot say. This rapidly warming weather has stirred up a restlessness, a yearning for action, and dissolved any patience for manipulating digital images on a screen. I grow frustrated at constraints that keep me from running away, unhinged, into the wild. These blooms are somehow silently provocative, and I am urged to “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs…” The dogs of what, exactly? We don’t live in a reality where anyone lets slip the dogs anymore, let alone cries ‘Havoc!’
But I drift. With phone camera in hand, I capture what images I can. Why? I don’t really know. Maybe just for proof that I was here and saw the world in some kind of way.
I look at that cherry tree today and all of its blossoms are gone, replaced by green leaves, supple and unfurling. I look at the photos I made and see the awful noise, the lack of resolution, and my better camera still sits on my desk unmoved. Maybe its not the device or the quality of the picture, but the perspective that matters, and I tell that to the tree, but I won’t see its blossoms again for another year and now I carry that regret.
Yet the earth still turns and the clouds of time race by overhead so quickly that its already now Azalea Season in the South.
It speaks to the age of my neighborhood, that the azaleas are well established here. I see them in the morning when the blooms are lit aglow by soft sunrise beams and I almost can’t contemplate them over the incessant singing of birds, as if the cardinal, phoebe, titmouse, wren, and sparrow all conspire with the flowers to crush me with overwhelming elegance.
The azaleas are spellbinding. Wondrous. And again I witness them in the evening while walking my dogs and again leave my better camera resting on the desk. The blooms are here, right before me, right now and the fact that I don’t appreciate them more is a tragedy, but the springtime fever has me yearning to be challenging myself in rough country far away. To be anywhere but here.
The wild beckons and I do have plans to go far away soon and my camera will be with me. But I am starting to grasp the fact that the camera will remain my excuse and will never provide me those opportunities.
There is a confluence occurring during the fleeting impermanence of spring. The urge to do great and adventurous things collides with disheartening missed opportunities, but when the chances do appear amidst a busy schedule the work falters before a dwindling hope that any of these efforts really amount to much at all.
What is this and what’s going on here? Is it just about sensing the transitory nature of time and the fear of not doing or seeing enough in this lifetime? No, it is more than that. It is a recognition of what resonates, and yet a dissonance in the approach to it. The observation of the immense beauty of nature right before me, yet still dreaming of adventure far away. The making of horrible photos with an inferior but convenient tool and cringing while sharing them, but taking pride in the compositions as a reflection of my perspective of the world. It is the discrepancy of investing enormous effort into learning and creating with the fading hope that it will lead to some measure of material success, when in fact it is already paying dividends in the realm of the transcendental- in gaining personal agency, in the orientation towards the truly good, in loving my fate.
In the 17th century, the samurai Miyamoto Musashi wrote The Book of Five Rings and several other treatises on sword fighting. He repeatedly describes the gaze and about “looking at” the reality of what is before us vs “looking in” towards intent and soul. So perhaps the balance demanded by springtime is just this; really seeing the glorious blooms and recognizing their bittersweet transience as a metaphor for the life that we have, and also looking in to what that means for our humanity and our pursuit of meaning.
And just maybe it is this “looking at” while also “looking in” all along that gave rise to a profound 20 year friendship with a cherry tree.
I’m heading out on another backpacking trip this coming week. A walk into the unknown! More to follow, but in the meantime, let me know your thoughts on this essay-
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I had 5 special trees on our farm growing up: a Maple tree with a diameter of at least 8 ft, a beautiful young Blue Spruce, whose color I admired daily, a perfectly shaped Dogwood, when in bloom had this incredible layer of blossoms, and finally, my 2 favorites, a special Gravenstein apple tree that I climbed daily during the fruiting season to grab from little green apples until the last apple disappeared from the tree picking several a day and then going to my final tree, a 50-60 ft tall Douglas Fir that I immediately climbed after picking the apples and sat in the top rocking in the wind for hours each summer day eating my apples!
Each tree meant something different to me but these 5 mattered beyond every other tree on the property!
What the ‘cherry tree’ and other such elements of nature and our surroundings give us always exceeds our expectations. And therein lies their power.