A Prairie Journal ™
Spring-Summer 2009
Backyard Lesson in the Tao
The first winter since I left my newspaper job, stepping away from a twenty-five-year career to create a life in which I hoped to work and move with less effort and stress, was difficult: brutal weather, chronic back pain, sinking prospects as the economy slid into unknown territory.
But on this morning in March when the last of the snow melted from my yard, hardship withered in the face of a season swelling with possibilities. Outside my door, my backyard tree begged to be noticed. Tiny, red buds poked from the tips of its outermost branches like silent exclamations. Watch me, they seemed to say.
Click on drawing to see enlargement
The tree arrived twelve years ago, a collection of sturdy trunks protruding from a big, burlap ball. Nurserymen dropped it off a truck in the alley and roped it, as if it were livestock, upright to my back fence while they dug a deep hole on the other side. It took three men to wrestle it through my garden gate and into place. “The goal the first year is survival,” said Leo, the lanky gardener who selected this specimen from off a tree lot.
“I’m in love with its slender, gray trunks and vase-like shape,” I wrote in my garden diary.
The Amelanchier arborea, a native shrub popular in the heartland, puts on a good show no matter the season: clouds of white flowers in spring, purple berries that draw birds in summer, orange-red leaves to wind down the growing season and flashes of bare, silvery limbs when the ground sparkles with frost.
Its common name is serviceberry, a holdover from when itinerant pastors preached beneath its branches, but it also goes by Juneberry for the month in which it produces fruit, and shadbush. Julia Ellen Rogers, a late 19th-Century author, once wrote: “We may easily trace this common name to the early American colonists who frugally fished the streams when the shad were running and noted the charming, little trees lighting up the river banks with their delicate blossoms, when all the woods around them were still asleep.”
It takes a lively imagination to conjure shad on my small, bone-dry lot, but a woodland was the image I carried when I laid flagstones where an imagined creek flows and hired Leo to bring the tree. Now triple the breadth and height of the specimen Leo’s men sunk into the ground, its budding presence on this March morning reminded me of how it feels to live on the brink of renewal, heart and head expanding with possibilities.
I imagined gathering friends for a party to toast spring when the tree exploded into bloom. I imagined digging in the moist dirt to rejuvenate the garden and my spirits. This year, I vowed, I would find time to do all these things.
But three weeks later, when the elongated buds were close to bursting, sleet pinged my windows, the sky blackened, and the wind revved up to dump snow and ice. My ability to work was limited because back pain — an unbidden but frequent guest for a decade — made it hard to sit or stand for long stretches. I thought back to March, when I loaded the season with expectations of gardening and celebration, and I wondered whether the tree would bloom at all this year.
I remembered a tai chi master’s reply when I told her I was surprised by her class, that I had hoped to learn a different tai chi from the one she taught. “The Tao is not big on hope,” she said. Her answer struck me as bleak, and I stopped going to her class, unable to accept the lessons she offered at that time.
The tree did bloom despite the storm, though it flowered late and only briefly during a rainy windy stretch, and there was no toast with friends. I was unable to garden, and there were moments when I no longer felt strong enough to live with unpredictable and chronic pain. Then, just as suddenly as a bud breaks or a bloom fades, despair dissolved, yielding only to return and yield again.
I remember that March morning brimming with possibilities because it brought me here, to this moment, and to the lessons I learn and relearn: Living without expectation is an art. The Tao is not big on hope. Imagining a perfect bloom is as good as witnessing one so long as you can let it go. And fishes can shimmy across a bone-dry lot.
Copyright 2009. Barbara Rose. All rights reserved.