Cottonwood — J. LIU THE INSTRUMENT

A few mornings ago a certain tint of gold, layered in the sunlight, told me that fall was near. I watched as it filtered through the heart shaped leaves of the cottonwood, and fell shimmering onto my desk: the central nervous system of my life. I find myself both amused and humbled to think that even without the measures of compasses and calendars, our simple observations can still give us a sense of orientation- where we are in the world, where we are in time.

Fall is, and has been, for perhaps all of my life, a season ridden with anxiety. When the temperature begins its descent, I begin to feel the sense that a great review is at hand. Soon the winds will come, blowing away all illusions and ask- what is it you have accomplished this year? The leaves will denouement and fall, and ask- what new grounds have you traversed for us to cover this year?

And yet, this looming threat of the possible exposure of my inadequacy always comes with a sister- a great sense of relief. Every fall, I am also relieved of all the endless tasks that the summer sun makes me feel are so very urgent to tend to. All the tweaks, last touches, and lower ranked tasks of the to-do list are blanketed over and put to sleep by the weather now corralling folks to stay inside.

This year, however, as I watched the light streaming through the cottonwood, I found myself feeling differently. The leaves of the cottonwood, like little palms, were flashing and shimmering in the sunlight, as if each and every one of them were waving to me- hello! Thousands and thousands of them, all backlit by gold, and all waving hello! to me, and to all my neighbors, and to all the world that cared to see.

It was just over a year ago when this tree was a pitiful sight: lopsided, covered in dead branches, plagued with suckers. It pained me everyday to look out the window and see the miserable thing, and I became certain its ugliness was having a malignant effect on my writing. And yet, I was afraid I didn’t know how to fix such a matter. In all the decades of living in this house, no tree has ever been pruned unless it was threatening to become the source of a lawsuit; no gardening project has ever been taken on that didn’t require just a shoestring budget and a couple of hours to accomplish. My ideas then to hire a tree company to come prune the tree for purposes of beautification were, naturally, relegated into the realm of extravagance and excess.

I tried to dismiss the urge. Tried to convince myself that it was unnecessary to tend to an issue which was considered non-urgent. But after mulling it over, and suffering through another slew of weeks of what I’m sure was bewitched writing, I decided the tree had to be pruned (-by professionals, of course; I have my compulsions, but I’d like to think I keep them within proper safety regulations). All the research I had done thus far about the health of the tree and protecting ourselves and our neighbors (cottonwoods are notorious for crushing cars amidst storms), seemed to all point to the pruning of the tree as the solution. But really, above all else, I could no longer take the vexing that the sight of the tree was causing me. I felt guilty that so much of my time at the desk had been spent gazing outside, daydreaming about which branches needed to be cut, and where, and how much. I thought something was wrong with me- that I was no longer faithfully willing one thing: my writing; that my heart had become two, and I secretly courted the Muses of the Gardens over those of the Desk. Yet I thought if fall was to come and ask what it was I had accomplished this year, and if I had nothing to show in terms of my writing, at least I could say that I aided this tree in becoming closer to its ideal form. - I’ve continued in my endeavor in adding beauty to the world, is what I would say. Would fall still accept me for it?

I had no idea what I was doing. No idea if the directions I gave to the pruners were right or not. As they came to shear off the dying branches, I kept recalling a conversation I had with a landscaping contractor months and months ago, where in the midst of discussing loose plans for the garden, he pointed to the cottonwood and said that this was a “weedy one”, that it was looking pretty sad, was most likely in the midst of dying, and probably best to just have it taken down. I wondered as I watched the branches drop if it wasn’t better to just have let the tree alone, forgotten all the grand schemes for something better. But immediately afterwards, seeing the results of the shearing, I became was ecstatic. Against the bone grey February sky, the branches, indeed, now held the form of something far far better to come.

A few mornings ago, the light that hit my desk, tinted with the gold of the incoming fall, hit in a different way than it had before in the past. It seemed as if all the anxiety that is normally bound up in the thought of fall had been filtered out by the leaves, leaving only the joy to pass through. What have I really done this year? I can say that I’ve pruned the tree- and that doing so has only been a boon to my life at the desk. I now no longer let minutes spill into fantasizing about the ideal forms of cottonwoods. If anything, a quick glance at the happy tree bolsters my efforts in the task before me. More than anything else, however, I have come to recognize a prejudice in me: that I have been living under the belief that beauty is hierarchical. I am beginning to see now that this is not at all the case. The objects and spaces surrounding us are equally capable in their ability to convey a degree of beauty which is commonly assumed to be only accessible through the “higher arts”. Moreover, it now appears that these arts are not exclusive from one another; and that in fact, they inform one another. The Muses of the Gardens are not exclusive of those of the Desk. They serve under the order of Beauty, and are enriched by the fruits of one another. If I have nothing more to give to the fall when it comes to question me, I feel this understanding, at least for me, is a harvest plentiful enough.