WINGS OF BEAUTY

Scattered over the mountains - the green parts and the stony parts, with a little cap of snow at the top - here and there glow puffs of pinkish-white where a cherry tree has somehow managed to be. How did each of them come to brighten there, like slow fireworks with those shimmery petals, amidst the solid shades of cedar, hinoki, oak, beech-- all the other stolidly green, right-at-home trees?

Single cherry seeds must have been dropped in each of those places way up there, in those most difficult of locations, by animals or birds, or by rainstreams flowing down from a parent tree above, now long gone. Perhaps that's why there are never two cherry trees together; they are scattered singly across these mountainsides, those little bursts of pink confetti, at least for this moment-- roundish wisps of brightness up there, flickering now in the wind, amid the overall somberness of the forest.

In the midst of one mountainside there is something white, not pink - as alone as any cherry tree, but not roundish like a cherry - it is tall and pointed... My handy binoculars tell me it is a tulip tree up there in full bloom, limbs raised high as though all the world should see its beauty-- perhaps indeed secretly stirring beauty everywhere, as the beat of a butterfly's wing begins a breeze.

The road below us is lined with cherry trees, as is the main road up through the village, that at this time of day are lit from behind us by the setting sun as the lake below turns dark sapphire in the background, white sails in the darkling air above the blossoming trees. All that beauty, like all the finest beauty - like the cherry blossoms themselves - lasts but a moment; then the sun fades behind the mountains, and that much splendor is nowhere but in ourselves.

CHERRY ARCADE

Down in the village by the Lake at the foot of the mountain we have our own little cherry tree street - as do most villages that have survived - that is lined with cherry trees now frothing in bloom. To pass under this long arcade while walking home from the station is, as the long-time-ago cherry-tree planters well knew, a living welcome-home blessing, of subtle fragrance and flowery light, both day and evening, lifting the spirit to its natural heights, a spirit one then brings into the home.

As for me, though, who must walk thence up the mountain (when I walk), I get to pass beyond there and along the road that meanders upward along the ridge, so I get to see, through gaps here and there in the curtains of green that line the way (with an occasional cherry tree or magnolia), glimpses of the flowering wild cherry trees that here and there shine among the green that blankets the steep sides of the upper slopes. There is something magical about those wild blossomings, off by themselves in the wild wood beyond reach and for no one to see, the dance nature dances when she's alone...