My Dad is an enigmatic creature, one minute he is wandering about like an absent minded dingbat and in the next he is spouting off deep, soulful wisdom that rocks you to the core. You can never be truly certain which will surface, the wandering fool or the brilliant sage. They seem inextricably linked. Today, on the phone, he spoke of love. He said, "One should always rejoice over love, for all things of this world pass away and LOVE is a beautiful experience. You should give yourself freely to it. You should hold nothing back out of fear of loss or pain. Like all experiences it will pass into something else, but it is better to have lived it than, in your fear, hide from its embrace".
Gotta love that ole' guy...
Yes, I know it doesn't look like much. It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall. The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep. But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy. I am a woman who loves the spring. I nearly live for it. When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis. I gorge. This year has been hard. Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally. The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
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What better use of our words than to speak of LOVE.