Finding a Future
I ask the tree before me, "how do you go on?"
It is past its prime. It will create no seedlings this year or any other. Its bark is coming off in patches and few of its branches have buds.
There is no answer, and there rarely is, but I think of this tree as I carry on through the ravine next to the Don Valley Parkway in a forgotten corner of Toronto. My mind is lightly fogged with beer and cognac because, I regret to say, I have begun to drink again. My hopes are gone. Doctors have determined that I am currently sterile and though I have further tests booked in the coming months, nothing in my experience with medicine or in the defeatist demeanor of my physicians gives me any particular optimism that this is going to be correctable. Perhaps not a rational response, but one learned through tired repetition.
Spring rolls by in a riot of life and I am the dead walking by, my footsteps an imperceptible imprint on the environment, doomed to be forgotten.
I know my friends and family find it hard to be around me. This darkness has cloaked me before and I have observed its repellent properties. But I am past offering them comfort. My watery smiles fool no one.
I emerge from the path and continue on past a playground and wonder how does the tree go on? What is its role when it has been robbed of next year? And so I thought a few months and years forward as the bark dropped away and the tree went gray and became riddled with holes and took on the musty moist smell of rot. And it finally gave way in a small tumult of earth and sticks and landed in a nest of leaves and broken branches. There it continued to decay and fall apart. Squirrels scuttled across it, myriads of grubs and many-legged-life take up residence underneath and the flesh of the tree becomes a mound under snow, and etched by the flickering seasons.
And in all of this it is a participant and this word, "participant" strikes me full across the muddled forehead. It continues in its existence and each moment is part of the world around it. One function is gone, to be replaced by another role.
It isn't the answer I want. It isn't the nice dramatic scream of injustice that allows the doomed to become a destroyer. But that is the kind of answer I get when I ask questions in the ravine, and one day I'll learn enough to stop asking.
The tree just goes on and on and fits, by its nature, into its next stage. At all times it has a place, a niche, because that is the dance that this ravine has been spinning for millenia.
So what of me with my ended future? What is the dance that I am supposed to participate in? If it isn't my place to crush those around me with despair and spread misery in my sphere, what am I supposed to do and where do I find the strength to listen to a dying tree in a ravine?
It is past its prime. It will create no seedlings this year or any other. Its bark is coming off in patches and few of its branches have buds.
There is no answer, and there rarely is, but I think of this tree as I carry on through the ravine next to the Don Valley Parkway in a forgotten corner of Toronto. My mind is lightly fogged with beer and cognac because, I regret to say, I have begun to drink again. My hopes are gone. Doctors have determined that I am currently sterile and though I have further tests booked in the coming months, nothing in my experience with medicine or in the defeatist demeanor of my physicians gives me any particular optimism that this is going to be correctable. Perhaps not a rational response, but one learned through tired repetition.
Spring rolls by in a riot of life and I am the dead walking by, my footsteps an imperceptible imprint on the environment, doomed to be forgotten.
I know my friends and family find it hard to be around me. This darkness has cloaked me before and I have observed its repellent properties. But I am past offering them comfort. My watery smiles fool no one.
I emerge from the path and continue on past a playground and wonder how does the tree go on? What is its role when it has been robbed of next year? And so I thought a few months and years forward as the bark dropped away and the tree went gray and became riddled with holes and took on the musty moist smell of rot. And it finally gave way in a small tumult of earth and sticks and landed in a nest of leaves and broken branches. There it continued to decay and fall apart. Squirrels scuttled across it, myriads of grubs and many-legged-life take up residence underneath and the flesh of the tree becomes a mound under snow, and etched by the flickering seasons.
And in all of this it is a participant and this word, "participant" strikes me full across the muddled forehead. It continues in its existence and each moment is part of the world around it. One function is gone, to be replaced by another role.
It isn't the answer I want. It isn't the nice dramatic scream of injustice that allows the doomed to become a destroyer. But that is the kind of answer I get when I ask questions in the ravine, and one day I'll learn enough to stop asking.
The tree just goes on and on and fits, by its nature, into its next stage. At all times it has a place, a niche, because that is the dance that this ravine has been spinning for millenia.
So what of me with my ended future? What is the dance that I am supposed to participate in? If it isn't my place to crush those around me with despair and spread misery in my sphere, what am I supposed to do and where do I find the strength to listen to a dying tree in a ravine?