The Contentment of a Tree

I was having breakfast just now, at home, listening to a Haydn piano sonata, while reading the day's newspapers. I used to have my meals everywhere but with the pandemic, I'm marooned at home ninety-nine percent percent of the time. I'm not exactly an outdoor person--the type who loves outdoor sports and activities, but I like being outside, feeling the heat and sunshine and watching people go about their lives.

I used to be as free as a bird--floating high above, flitting from branch to branch, in Shelley's words, a "scorner of the ground". But now I'm like a tree, rooted in one place.  But it's not too bad to be a tree with a wide canopy, providing shelter to creatures below, with roots radiating out into the surrounding, savouring its precious nutrients, while receiving the blessings of sunlight and rain from above. 

A solitary tree, sturdy and strong in facing the vicissitudes of weather is a good metaphor for the kind of life I'm living now. Or at least that's how I strive to be. What a beautiful machinery a tree is! It is solar-powered and only uses what's available around it, accepting its limitations, and growing around obstacles. It is subtly insistent, its roots occasionally piercing into concrete, if required. If we subject a tree to stop motion photography, we'll realize it is actually a moving object--only that it lives on a different speed from what we are used to. These foliage fiends are models of patience--it plots slowly, stretching branches and aligning leaves to reach sunlight, and silently burrows its roots towards live-giving hints of water.

A tree lives in the moment. It accepts what it is given and makes do with it. It satisfies its yearning for more by simply making the tiny adjustments required to realign its growth. If it is pruned by some fastidious gardener, it obediently remolds itself into its masters vision of perfection--a pet and performer of infinite patience.

A tree can die. Sometimes violently, being chopped down by humans or struck by lightning. At other times, it goes away gently, withering in a drought, its leaves and branches decomposing back into the soil, recycling its nutrients back to its community of fauna. And that's how we should all live. We are given a moment in time. We do what we can and we return back what we had momentarily borrowed. We are merely passing participants in the pageant of life.

And what a beautiful thing life is. A tree embodies this beauty to utter perfection. I have been a bird of passage, but now I am a tree, sitting in contentment in the fields, taking it all in: a host and witness to the fecundity, above, below and around me.