Running for Your Life: Tree-dom

So after a hiatus from this blog, I’m running at home in Prospect Park during the last lap of a heat wave.

Leaves are falling. Little ones and medium-sized. There’s a wide variety of species in Prospect Park, and I’m thinking these slender ones, prematurely yellow and brittle from the days of scorching heat and high humidity, are from a black cherry tree.

That is what I feel myself as I catch one, the first leaf of 2018, got to be the earliest I’ve ever caught a leaf on the run, thrilled to have it but alarmed that leaves are falling so early in the year. Seasons heating, if you ask me, or anyone who doesn’t have an agenda.

The run is my second since we returned from an Italian holiday. Did my darndest to keep political news at bay but upon return am struck by how the silos of political opinion have hardened.

What can we agree on? Perhaps a leaf? Which by coincidence just happened to be the first note I made in a journal that I bought for this trip.

It was twilight (June 16) and a light breeze was blowing:

“Leaves dry and brittle, some
in constant motion, and
in the foreground the tufted
swath taking whatever
force the moving air gathers,
a gentle wind to driving
rainstorm, nothing but to
do their part and defend,
protect the whole.

Damn, how humans can learn from trees.
What seems ever more true
in hot, dry climates like this
one. Nature shows us the way,
leaves as people, ants and ant
societies. When we lose sight
of the big picture, trying to
forge solutions that will, at
best as we are to manage, support
life, pride and respect for those
born in our time, then what good
are we? Can we simply carve ourselves
a sliver of space and give succor
to only our friends and loved ones?
Or dig a hole and plant a tree.
Go home and walk a dog. We are nothing
compared to that. We unenlightened
weak-willed humans, who would
not do our part in the best way
and most noble intent to husband
with the strength and power of a just society,
are not deserving of being
seen as admirable as a single leaf.”

Next: “Inadvertent” by Karl Ove Knausgaard

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