WINGS OF BEAUTY

Scattered over the mountains - the green parts and the stony parts, with little caps of snow at the top - here and there the eye finds puffs of pinkish-white where a cherry tree has somehow managed to be. How did each of them come to brighten there, pastel notes amidst the darker tones of cedar, hinoki, oak, beech, all the other stolid, right-at-home trees?

Cherry tree seeds reached each of those places way up there, in those difficult locations, likely dropped by birds or washed down by rainstreams from a parent tree above, now long gone. Perhaps that's why there are rarely two cherry trees together; they are scattered singly across these mountainsides, in little bursts of pink confetti for this moment at the edge of Spring - roundish wisps of brightness up there, shimmering now in the wind, small celebrations amid the overall somberness of the forest. 

Up there on one mountainside, though, is a single tree that is white, not pink, and not roundish or windshimmery like a cherry-- it is tall and pointed. My handy binoculars tell me it is a tulip tree up there at full bloom, limbs arrayed in natural majesty of the kind that finds its way into royal coats of arms.

The road below us is lined with cherry trees, that at this time of day are lit from behind us by the setting sun, the lake far below darkening blue in the background, sailboats sailing in the shadowed air above the flowering trees. All that beauty, like all the finest beauty - like those blossoms themselves - abides but a moment; then the sun is gone behind the mountains, and all that splendor now is nowhere but in ourselves.

PRICING THE OUTDOORS

After days of heavy rainy-season rain, except for when I was in the office (yesterday heavy and continuous rain through which I gazed at my stacks of logs to be split), here I am on another sunny day in the office, recalling how the lake looked this morning not long after I awoke at around dawn into the thick silence that falls like a sky-sized blanket when a monsoon rain abruptly stops-- and way up there on the mountain the residual mist makes the atmosphere visible, imparting new depths as it dissipates with the rising light...

I stood at the big glass doors that front the living room and sipped my tea while watching the sky clear and the lake turn blue, starting with a ragged hole of golden sunlight opening over the middle of the cloud-gray water, the hole widening as the clouds broke up, into crumbly tufts by the time I was freewheeling downhill through the scattering mist to catch the train that took me to what by the time I arrived was a warm sunny city.

That morning scene recalled to me this snippet from an article by Barbara Ehrenreich:

"I need to see vast expanses of water, 360 degree horizons, and mountains piercing the sky -- at least for a week or two of the year. According to evolutionary psychologist Nancy Etcoff, we all do, and the need is hard-wired into us. 'People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they like somewhere to go where they can not be seen themselves,' told Harvard Magazine earlier this year. 'That's a place desirable to a predator who wants to avoid becoming prey.' We also like to be able to see water (for drinking), low-canopy trees (for shade), and animals (whose presence signals that the place is habitable.)" The Rich Have Priced the Outdoors out of Everyone Else's Hands [Except where I live. RB]

I do like a broad expanse of landscape, especially above water, though it's been a long time since I felt like either predator or prey. As to "animals whose presence" etc., the deer (that I would have sworn had all moved way upmountain by now) just ate all my chard and all the leaves off my bean plants, acknowledging in their deery way my small efforts at making the place more habitable.