Between the Pinkness

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Whatisbeautifulremains

I don’t know how long the apple orchard has been there. The trees are mature, reaching as high as apple trees can. Let’s say I was ten when it was planted. That would mean the orchard is almost 40 years old.

Forty years is a while. It is enough time to draw in a lot of rain and oxygen, and to push your roots into the places where the nutrients are richest. In forty years, you get the hang of how, just when it seemed apple season would last forever, winter sweeps in. In forty years, even when winter has absorbed every last sign of life, you don’t forget that spring is someday in the future.

Eventually, though, it happens that the seasons turn and spring overwhelms you. You didn’t remember it was so soft, or vulnerable. Spring is discovered as if it never existed, like the surprise you feel when you find a place which has been waiting, on the edge of the orchard, to enfold you in momentary petals.

Under the Pinkness Branch

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Whatisbeautifulremains

I realize not every picture I choose to share is necessarily an aesthetic triumph. Ok. They may not all even qualify as “picture.”

It is the experience in the image I hope you see. Because I probably wish we had been here together, brushing past the bees on the apple blossoms, watching petals fall as we pull a pile of flowers close to our faces to catch their scent. Curling under branches that, growing toward each other across the orchard, make a bridge too delicate and precious to risk disturbing.

The Untended Pinkness

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Whatisbeautifulremains

For the unknownth year, the orchard behind the old county mental health facility blossoms untended. Its not my first abandandoned apple orchard. Near Berthoud, Colorado there’s a T in the road where NCR (that’s North County Road) 21 ends, and an old ranch fence barricades about 20 apple trees from the oncoming traffic. When I was living there, I never had the courage to stop the car and climb into that orchard. Maybe that regret is singing somewhere in the back of my mind. Or maybe I just never had the camera.

You see yourself differently surrounded by apple blossoms. That’s a plain fact. Next year, you can visit me, and try it for yourself, if this orchard survives the developer who has parked their trailer at then end of the rows, about 40 yards from the old sidewalk. Or, maybe you can take a ride down NCR 21 in Larimer County and let me know how those trees are doing. I feel I owe them something.

Farewell, Rosey Tree

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Whatisbeautifulremains

Thinking about what to say is almost never the answer, any more than re-thinking what you have already said seems to help anything. All I can promise is that if the Rosey Tree and I are still neighbors next spring, I will visit her. I will ask her the same questions as always:

Who brought you here?
Why are you alone?
Can you please hold still, just for a second?
Can you show me how to live with some fraction of the beauty in myself?

And then, I went to the orchard.

Pinkness Revelled

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Whatisbeautifulremains

The city girl in me is on alert as I climb up the old sidewalk to the Rosey Tree. To make the pictures I want to see, I need time alone and unobserved. The Rosey Tree is in an ideal spot for such moments. And of course, its isolation is what scares me.

Because to find a picture, I might have to get lost. Correction: I will have to get lost. Lost in the tree. Lost in my eyes. Lost to most of the world around me. Lost from the self that is trudging across the grass with a tripod, for chrissake.

No matter where I am, finding a picture requires being vulnerable. Requires forgetting why I can’t, or shouldn’t, do certain things. It really doesn’t matter if anyone else is there to see, or not. It is always a risk. I am always afraid.

Somedays, I forget more readily than other days. Somedays, I leave unseen pictures hanging heavy from the branches, like the scraps of prayers tied to temple trees in Japan. All I can do is hope the un-lost moments will carry forward on the breeze to another, braver day when 20 minutes, safely alone in the world, doesn’t seem too much to ask.

The Pinkness Irresistible

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Whatisbeautifulremains

Its meaning is clear: Come here. Come over HERE. Now -reach out. Catch a little of the magic dust that has spilled across these tender folds. Carry it, unawares, in the ridges of your fingers and spend it somewhere far away, rubbed against a sympathetic branch, which is waiting for just this intrusion.

It is not accident that we use these brazen delicacies to speak for us. How could we admit such things to ourselves, any other way?

Return of the Rosey Tree

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Whatisbeautifulremains

This flurry of pink has no business living where I found it last year, at the end of the crumbling asphalt between Farm and Fleet’s parking lot and the the Dane County Mental Health Campus. Rosey buds accumulate in isolation now, but sometime not so long ago, someone had greater ambition for this tree than obscurity. Did they plant her for a memory or for the future; or as with most acts of love, with hopes of both in mind?

The Pinkness Midst

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Whatisbeautifulremains

In the midst of spring is when I find it hardest to believe spring will ever come again. I want to shout, “Wait, wait for me!” to every rose or cream or blistering fuschia branch that whizzes by me as I sit, stationary in my car, waiting to arrive wherever. My heart does not feel big enough to receive, never mind contain, the life radiating towards Something no more or less wonderful than its Self. Maybe I am radiating, too, in sympathy with the coded message ciphered by the leaves and petals and twigs and stems. “Come with us,” they whisper. “We are going your way.”

Pinkness Karma

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Whatisbeautifulremains

As those of you who have regularly parked a car in an urban center know, parking karma is no myth, and it is not a funny joke. Driving around the same blocks, over and over, watching for signs of a parking space – shining white back up lights, a person strolling into the street with keys in hand – takes on the ritual depth of any circumambulation. City dwellers perform this ritual because they must, and everyone agrees that, over the years, if it is done with a pure and humble heart, eventually you will achieve uncanny access to just the perfect parking place at the perfect moment.

Although the tree here blossoms in white, I consider it to be part of The Pinkness, and the fact that it lives less than 20 feet from my parking space is no coincidence. I firmly believe that in exchange for the convenience of a Guaranteed Perfect Parking Space, the Universe has cashed in my parking karma rewards, earned, block by futile block, in Chicago, a lifetime ago.

Of course, you can’t earn a blessing as lovely as this tree through merit or devotion. All you can do is this: Open your eyes. Get out your camera. Realize to your great shame and delight that in 7 years, you never noticed before that it was raining petals on you as you walked to your car.

Magnolia Confusion

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Whatisbeautifulremains

No, the sky wasn’t really that blue. But it is important to note that there is nothing wrong with confusing the world we wish to see, and seeing the world as it actually is. In fact, we get nowhere until we accept the reality of both visions. Why do we need to know the difference between the shine of sunlight and the sparkle of buds yearning towards it, concentrating it into another substance altogether, distilling the starry presence into life itself? As if the world as it actually is could be somehow less celestial than we can possibly dream.

what is beautiful remains

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