not native fruit

basket of trees

[a few years ago i thought i'd experiment with the villanelle-form; i was also a student of kundalini psycho-spirituality at the time, so this image of the basket of trees, meaning the marvelously undulating and spiraling forms of the camphors and rhododendrons that surround our house, form-echoes of both the path of kundalini and the structure of the nervous system, was very meaningful to me:]

I live in a basket made of trees

Whose arching boughs uplift my mind

Flickering like leaves tossed in the breeze.

Surface and depth, shadow and light,

My soul space changes always because

I live in a basket made of trees.

The view from my windows grants the gift of height,

Looking all round at the actions of humans

Flickering like leaves tossed in the breeze.

The dark penumbra of these pensive crowns

Are pierced by the penetrating spiritual light;

Flick’ring through this basket of trees,

And woven with rain refreshing the boughs,

Making blissful this dappled experience of time.

Of living in a basket made of trees,

with flickering leaves tossed and changed by the breeze.

trees (and birds)

   i grew up in the shade of norway maples and other larger, grander trees whose names i don't know, and now i live under spreading camphor trees, amid the songs of birds, and i feel unaccountably fortunate.  i can't imagine life without the dappled light of sun through leaves, and when i've lived in treeless zones, i've put lace over the windows to simulate that play of light. 

i grew up in a very urban environment, yet we experienced the luxury of trees.  i've seen photos of treeless villages in places as widely dysjunct as Ireland, China, Africa; have visited relatively treeless villages in Denmark and in western US states.  How can people survive without trees?

I've read that some cultures regard trees as sources of 'yin forces' (ghosts, demons).  Dangerous, because they can uproot and fall on houses, people, cars in heavy weather or when the soil is saturated with water.  I attended a lecture in Tibetan medicine that traced a serious disease to the lacquer tree.  So, I guess there is a down side to trees after all.  On the other hand, we need them to absorb carbon dioxide and to produce oxygen, shade, nuts, resins, firewood, beauty, flowers and fall color, food and homes for birds, and more.

If human beings lived among trees for many generations - and that is definitely the case for europeans - then the milieu of crepuscular light and bird-song is natural to us, and winds down deep streams of association from our senses to our cellular memory and dna. 

Forest Mind.

green epiphany

I grew up in an urban setting, and most of my forays into 'nature' were very manicured: city parks, which were nonetheless truly wonderful places - the Philadelphia Fairmount Park system, the green space along the Schuylkill River (accessible from the East River and the West River Drives), day-camp at Raven Hill Academy, girl-scout hikes through rather scrubby terrain, and most magical and unmanicured and free-natured of all, the New Jersey seashore.  Still, my major life-experience was urban.  Concrete was the name of the game, with the exception of the most magical of sentinels: the trees along our city streets.  I absolutely and literally adored the trees.

But I had a true 'green epiphany' at twenty, when I visited a commune near Wilbur Mills, New Hampshire for two weeks that turned into a year in New England. 

I'd never seen anything like it: the interior of the third-cutting forest, where summer's broad sunlight penetrated the young thick-growing trees only as a most magical greenish light, reflecting from the forest floor in a network of criss-crossing rivulets.  I've never seen a photograph that could capture it.  In fact, I've never seen it anywhere else but in that particular patch of lichen-splotched, spring-green-leafed trees off a single-lane road in New Hampshire....

redwood candles

Knowledge lights the human path

/ since time forgotten  /

redwood remembers

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Berkeley is a city dedicated to Knowledge (capital K). 

It seems fitting that its blue skies should be incandesced by the tops of redwood trees.  These are among the largest and most ancient of our oldest pre-flowering plants, and connect us to a primeval past, which can be inchoately felt in their presence.  They link us to the time when our voyage through the oceans of knowledge was just beginning.

A Russian friend of mine who studied with a russian shaman in her youth, tells me that most trees will 'commune' with you, but not redwoods.  Their special gift is longevity, and they will share this 'knowledge' or perhaps better-said, this 'skill' with you, if you know how to approach them.  This was her own discovery, I suppose, as she continues on here in north america with the work she began in Russia.  Anyway, it's an aside, but perhaps a reflection of a particular 'ocean of knowledge,' namely knowledge of the arcane / knowledge of energy, rather than literate knowledge or knowledge of technological skill. 

These beautiful redwood candles are visible all over Berkeley, sometimes on almost every block in some neighborhoods.  Here are just a few from mine.  You've seen one on the 4th of July post, and this one is a few blocks away.  The one below is behind my 96-year old friend's house.