Mr. Wilson's Arboretum

Dec 31, 2000

The Second Day of Christmas

Christmas, as you may know, has twelve days. The Arboretum having built up something of a backlog of images, I’m going to use the occasion as an excuse to post some unseen pictures from the past year. There being twelve months, to correspond to the twelve days, I’m going to put up a daily picture, one from each month. Of course, yesterday, the first day of Christmas, got special treatment, but everything was from this current December, so we’ll move now to last January, and by the time we reach Epiphany, maybe we’ll know what happened to the year.

Dec 25, 2000

Merry Christmas!

A Few Ornaments

Dec 24, 2000

The Night Before

Christmas Eve is here again, conjuring a Holiday out of the darkness.
The whole thing hinges on a new dawn, full of mysterious gifts, deposited while we sleep.
But what of the night itself?
I’ve wondered lately, for this Christmas is different. Coming so close on the heels of my father’s death, it is indelibly marked by that event.
I would honor the Holidays, and I have a personal tradition of making a Christmas card, but it’s been a little harder this year. In searching for the theme, I thought about the nether side of Christmas, of how it’s babe is born to die, and how that’s not much mentioned. That’s for another day, no doubt, but it haunts the holiday no less.

Haunting is for the night.
There is the new dawn, and the triumph of light, and the splendor of illumination.
But also there is Night.
Beside the songs of joy and celebration, the cannon of Christmas Carols offers an alternative tradition of quiet, pensive night songs; lullabies, in fact, which acknowledge the mixed implications of the occasion. To these I turned for inspiration, finding a confluence of images and feelings.
For I thought of Mary, singing her child to sleep, fearing for his future.
And I thought of how children do not want to sleep, least of all on Christmas Eve, and yet, they always do.
And how it’s only then, in the unwilled moment of drooping lids, that the anticipated event occurs.
And I thought of my father, dozing by day, fighting to be present, yet restless at night, waking repeatedly, hoping for one more morning.
A different sort of anticipation.
And I thought how easy it is for me to sleep.
In middle life, without the nagging chafe of youth or age, I do not require lullabies.

All of which makes for a Christmas card that’s not quite celebratory, but is what the Holiday has brought me this year. I thought of tacking on some sort of uplifting final stanza, but it didn’t seem right. Even our most joyous holidays are deeply serious at the core. Our needs will be addressed insofar as we can express them.
That's prayer.
The rest is tinsel.

Anyway, here’s the card.
Cheerier next year, I promise.
Sleep tight, and no peeking.

Dec 21, 2000

Solstice

The first day of Winter.
Not the same as, but not distinct from, the New Year, or Christmas, for that matter. Both holidays articulate the fact of the Solstice, making a metaphor that likens lengthening days to birth: the year’s or something more. For all our materialism, we do not honor the objective occasion of the Solstice, but prefer poetic interpretations.
Astrology over Astronomy.

The Magi knew both.
The star they followed was seen somewhere other than the sky, else Herod wouldn’t have asked of its appearance. He’d have seen it for himself. But if the star was an astrological observation, you can be sure that the Magi also knew the visible heavens, and took the measure of the Solstice. Nor did they distinguish between their science and their art, but used the one to plumb the other.
Wise men, indeed...

Our prognostications are not so sophisticated.
Mostly we look for Christmas snow, and rarely find it. This Winter is coming on strong, though, with some snow already, and more forecast. Then again, we also saw sixty degrees last Sunday, with thunder and lightning and rainbows, so who knows? There’s even a solar eclipse occurring on Christmas, and the fact that I already know about it proves that we have learned to predict some things, after all.
But can we find that star?

Dec 12, 2000

Fall and Mount

Back from Iceland, with its skewed seasons; time distorted through the lens of northern latitude. The low-slung sun skids across the horizon for a few hours: morning, noon and evening indistinguishable. Here, too, the days grow short, or at least we intercept less sunlight. Autumn erodes until we reach the Solstice. There we may look ahead to better days; more sun; new seasons; a whole new year. And all these hopes bundled into what we call Christmas, a catch-all holiday, preeminent among our celebrations, if unfocused.

Yes, the Holiday Season is here again, drawing us into another round of revelry. Most cultures have some extended holiday sequence, but we generally dole ours out one by one, a day off here and there, a few long weekends to mitigate our daily labors. Only now do we allow a sequence of occasions, each triggering the next, as Thanksgiving signals the approach of Christmas, which cannot come without the New Year on its heels. Taken all together, summation and a new beginning are implicit, but the form is pure Capitalism: a fever of expenditure to honor...what? The birth of God, or some such thing...
You’d think that Christians might regret our choice in making Christmas a bigger Holiday than Easter, but is being born any less miraculous than being reborn?

Birth is not so much on my mind this Christmas season, except that Death remains its other side.
Death has demanded too much of my time of late.
Unseemly greed,
if it but wait,
Death shall have all my time.
But now,
I live.
It is my father who is dead,
and I feel bad.
Such is the simple equation of grief.

Grieving distances me from the Holidays. Sharing in celebration unites us, vitiating our idiosyncratic concerns, but putting on the mourning cloak isolates me from the hum and whirl. Mourning was once an institution of some formality, with rules to observe, which, like the Holidays, served to define our place within the Mystery. Now, like so much of our spiritual technology, it is neglected; something to get through, or over; and not to burden others with.

I stood on the Mount, “going through it”.
The Mount is the hill rising behind (that is, West of) the Conservatory Garden. Once, it was fortified, and formerly it housed the Sisters of Charity, but now it is a ruin. More than a ruin, it is a disturbed site. The whole top of the hill has been scooped out, and is used for composting the Park’s dead trees, which are reduced to wood chips nearby. Unwholesome characters frequent the tangled and tumbled margins of the height, and a general air of disorganization and destruction hangs over the place, with its steaming piles of chopped up life. It seems a charnel house of trees.

Such associations, no doubt, induced me, there, to rummage in the charnel house of memory, finding memories not fully formed, still animated by lost life, arguing against my need to extinguish and encrypt them. I could see all sides of this thing, my father’s death, but I could not see through it.

In that oblique moment, I saw myself, and I saw his death, but I did not see him. Mostly I suffered remorse over the medical decision making to which I had been party. What was done was not wrong; merely humane, but I nevertheless served, along with the doctors, in an embassy of death, a role more profound than I am accustomed to, and one that taxed my capacities. I’d been forced into a direct observation, and thus, an experience of, the incompatibility between Life and Death. I had requested my father’s death, yet I could not hope for it. I wished him to live and to die at the same time, which is not a tenable position to think from, though it may be a place from which to begin praying.

It’s not that my prayers have gone unanswered;
I just don’t ask for much.
What I’ve gone through is only a natural duty in the course of Life. It’s not a happy charge, but I can hardly resent it. Not without resenting Life itself.

What I am left with is my father. Not alive, but as himself, transcending the ghoulish guise of his death. For though I attended on his death, I cannot share it. None of us can die for another. This we know, and though we aver that there is One who dies for us, our doubt is such that we honor best the birth, and leave the rest to hope. But my father remains with me, dead and alive.

I see him now less as my father, and more as a man with his own life, which he navigated in his own peculiar, but not unsuccessful way. No longer the exemplar that a child sees, yet still I find in him a standard that I will always measure myself by. His completion does not complete our relationship. It will go on as long as I live. And this I call “coming into my inheritance”, which does not have to do with goods or funds, but is the compensation paid for making one of Life’s darker passages.

So I mused, upon the Mount, amid the rot and ruin.
The landscape disturbed, but my thoughts now less so.
Life is subject to disturbances, but these are also opportunities of a sort. Just so, a place like the Mount is an ecological hot spot. New plants rush to sprout in the freshly turned earth, which also reveals worms and bugs, attracting a wide array of birds, and even some surprising mammals, like the Woodchuck I saw there recently.

And I’ve seen the Kestrel, perched atop the Mount, or hovering above it. The Kestrel is a little Falcon, hardly bigger than a Robin, but a puissant bird of prey nonetheless, and the only one that hovers. It used to be called the Sparrow Hawk, but the name has changed, or rather reverted to the traditional European one, I think for the better. This nomenclature was championed by Roger Tory Peterson, whose Field Guide to the Birds was a landmark in the popularization of birding, and a 1947 edition of which is a part of my inheritance from my father. Peterson doesn’t mention the alternative name of the European species, which is Windhover, as I only learned while looking into foreign birds for the recent trip. This bit of knowledge put me in mind of the poem by Hopkins, and if it did not fundamentally alter my understanding of his meaning, it did expand my vision of his imagery, as I had always pictured a larger bird, not knowing about tiny, fluttering falcons, until I had seen one for myself.

Being alive, I could appreciate the death-dealing bird, beautiful and terrible, like Life itself.
For mourning is not our reaction to death, but our reaction to being alive, in the face of death.
And I thought of a different poem by Hopkins, which aptly wraps these feelings in an Autumnal metaphor.
And I’ve decided to put the Arboretum into Holiday mode, as best I can, for my woes cannot cloak the bare trees in black.
The Seasons and the Holidays teach a rhythm we must abide,
and do not recognize my loss
as different from the fallen leaves.
They do not reflect me,
but allow me to project
Father and Falcon,
Peak and Pit,
the Living and the Unalive
that ceaselessly in me collide.

Nov 23, 2000

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving from Reykjavik, where trees are few and stunted, but a fine time is being had by all travelers.
This is a relatively low-tech trip, and it´s about as much as I can do to get this minimal post up, but I do have things to be thankful for.
In the wake of my father´s death, I can safely say that the number one thing to give Thanks for is Life, with all its Mystery.
To live is to be caught up in a larger web of relationships. We have not just life, but Life. This is really what the Thanksgiving Holiday honors, by focusing on the food that sustains us, and binds us to the plants and animals we share our lives with.
To appreciate the colors of the trees, and not merely to harvest their fruits, is something I also give Thanks for, the gift of human consciousness.
The only way I know of thanking is to give back in kind what I have gained. So here, not from Iceland, but from Central Park, is one last glance at the colors of Fall.
Enjoy the Holiday.

Nov 17, 2000

Wow

older posts...

The Seventh Day of Christmas

The Sixth Day of Christmas

The Fifth Day of Christmas

The Fourth Day of Christmas