Sunday Story: The Tree of Life

As much as I love trees and delight in their sight and proximity, I've always felt that the few stumpy ficus trees garnishing, or should I say, trying to garnish the sidewalks that lead to the "Sanayeh" public park, were a little prosaic and uninspiring. Their thick, stocky trunks, stout branches, and vapid, dark green, plastic-like foliage gave me no visual enthrallment to speak of.

Yet something unusual happened which I only recently came to understand.

As I walked on that gloomy april day past a few of those relatively unattractive leaf bags, I almost mechanically slowed down, and stood, cold, in front of one. I looked at it for over five minutes, not really knowing what about it was so undefinably attractive. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't slender. It had no particularly defining features nor a particularly suiting background. In other words, it was as non-picturesque as any of the other ones flanking that particularly dull stretch of asphalt parallel to hamra street.

But I had my camera, and I was on a mission. I needed to take as many pictures as one hour of meandering on a gloomy and overcast april day would let me.

And I did. I half-heartedly took the one picture, and then moved along somewhat perplexed, and utterly unsatisfied.

I never gave it another thought until I looked at it again, a couple of weeks later. It then struck me like a thunderbolt. How could I not have seen it earlier? I guess I did. I just didn't know it.

And there it was, the tree of life, standing in all its glory, an almost exact replica of the very one that springs out of our hearts and gives us the gift of day.

And it wasn't just the large and small arteries it so astonishingly embodied. It was also the veins and the lymphatics, the thick and delicate peripheral nerves, it was our very own trunks, narrow limbs and slender fingers. It was everything, even our mother soil, our family roots, and our genealogy. And it wasn't just this tree, but every lonely tree in this lonely amazing world of ours.

Now, after a long period of indifference, those unassuming unattractive ficus trees have become dearer to me than all the others.

And now I know that no matter how complex, unstable, metamorphosing, capricious, weak, sad, fragile, moody, greedy, jealous, selfish, and human I may seem, look at me hard and you will see that I'm nothing really, that you're nothing really, but a walking tree.