OPineJournal

Around some corners, there are edens, not of the bible, nor from lore of any kind. My little edens are reminders of the best I can live, and though part imaginary, part real, part future and part past, they are my most natural state of being. Walking beside me, silent, radiant, a thoughtful smile dimpling her cheeks, we experienced the most natural peace. We glided when together. I turned to her one evening, having rolled in the grass like children, delivered, and though I didn't know it at first, shared her first bottle of wine after crossing the age barrier, and I told her I was crazy about her. We had looked deep into each other's eyes, wary of a hint of trouble, a crack that didn't already belong, but there was no trouble, no crack. She stopped and looked at me with love, smiling, and explained that she was flattered, but also had been voted the class flirt in High School. I smiled, and we both walked on as before. This little eden is one of few in my life not taint...

The letter arrived at my office, the address several degrees off horizontal, written in careful, straight, but shaky, small block letters. It explained that the writer's husband had passed away recently, but had enjoyed receiving the publications we'd been sending him for years as an emeritus member of our organization. I wasn't sure anyone read the publications until this note arrived, which told me in the briefest terms, that her husband loved what he did, even after giving up his practice, continuing to keep up with the literature of his life. "He was 90" she wrote, and the letter I read told a much longer story. I recently watched the film Александра (Aleksandra), again, about age, wisdom - and the Russian conflict with Chechnya. Aleksandra visits her grandson at his barracks. He is a soldier on the Chechnyan border, and she has not seen him in seven years. He's being what he is, a soldier, and she a grandmother, freed from the bonds of her marriage, w...

I was walking in the woods a while ago, and found myself admiring the stout oaks in their second century, and wondering what it is about - age, size, greatness of any kind, that moves people, that moves me? I could philosophize, quote the greats, point to the brilliantly exposed paradoxes of others, but then, there I go again. Greatness, grandness. There is the myth of wisdom from antiquity, the idea that what we don't know is something more than what we do, that what once was, was more true than what is, when all it is, is suspicion, and the passing on of experience from a rock to a feather, the belief in common that the extrusion of both is the paradox of sameness and difference, that the contrast, the conundrum, the magic born of them is a higher wisdom, or a grain of sand. I think perhaps that is what draws me to trees - the idea that they have watched over the history of my time, silently. And they 'know' stuff, that no one of us does, and so I know not what color...