Summer growth

As late summer's shadows grow longer, a new school year begins.

In my court

 

Back among friends.

Fecundity

Update on what's doing, and isn't doing, in the Lang courtyard maple

world - the broken spring sprig, and hopeful treelets among the gravel.

Forest floor

At school yesterday, enjoying the summer's peace and quiet, I betook myself to the courtyard to be with the trees. I mostly hang out in the canopy out my office window, though I make visits to touch the trunks of the red maples on the ground - including checking those who seem to have given up the ghost. But I don't usually sit in the white gravel platform, and so hadn't realized that not a few of those samaras seem to have taken root.  

Tree tale

It's a gorgeous sunny day, and the Lang courtyard maples' leaves are already almost full size and deepening green in taking best advantage of it. 

But perhaps you've been wondering what's become of that red maple branch which came so close to my office window this spring, and allowed me rapturous witness to the magical procession from bud to flower to growing samara to leaf. It's a little complicated. The short version is that the branch is broken.

Not completely, but it dangles down now rather than reaching up. Here's how it looked last week; below is the way it's looking now. 

I can't remember a branch so close before. I even encouraged students to reach out the window and touch it! But the very thing that made it available for my devotion put it at risk. When the wind eddies in the courtyard, branches brush against the windows. No surprise that some will have snapped from the collision.

And so we dangle, small leaves green but wilting. My witness continues.

Greening of the self

 

As students were sharing their final projects for "Religion and Ecology: Buddhist Perspectives," the wall of the courtyard out our classroom window, recovering from a night of rain, made its own offering.

 

Joanna Macy: The self is the metaphoric construct of identity and agency, the hypothetical piece of turf on which we construct our strategies for survival, the notion around which we focus our instincts for self-preservation, our needs for self-approval, and the boundaries of our self- interest. Something is shifting here. The conventional notion of the self with which we have been raised and to which we have been conditioned by mainstream culture is being undermined. What Alan Watts called “the skin-encapsulated ego” and Gregory Bateson referred to as “the epistemological error of Occidental civilization” is being peeled off. It is being replaced by wider constructs of identity and self-interest—by what philosopher Arne Naess termed the ecological self, co-extensive with other beings and the life of our planet. It is what I like to call “the greening of the self.”

Canopies

Lift-off!

What were just tufts ten days ago lifted off in the last two!

Hill of beans

William James on the illusion of order - or disorder - in the world.

When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the

other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely

human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful,

æsthetic, or moral,—so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact

emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents

of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from

our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by

choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of

any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I

could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in

almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then

say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other

beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature

are just like this. She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious

lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the

special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither

named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things 'unadapted' to

each other in this world than there are things 'adapted'; infinitely more things

with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look

for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve

it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of

them fills our encyclopædias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an

infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of

relations that never yet attracted our attention. (Varieties, 438n)

Is our cherry-picking too unambitious? Noticing the unremarked "relations" among the "infinite chaos of objects" might be part of making them into adaptations. I love the bean game. Maybe Bruno Munari can help us take it farther! Courtyard maples in red/green/yellow approve!

Leafing out

A few of our seeds managed to get fertilized, and leaves are popping!

Here come the samaras

You've seen this branch before it let everything hang out.

Maple blossoms!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flowers on the female red maple nearest my office window.

First blush

The Lang courtyard maples made good use of Spring break.

Gardener divine

A friend asked how my trees were doing. It's been a busy schedule of teaching and other duties, I reported, but I do have snippets of time for my book project. I looked at the courtyard maples, ready to pop. Share something fun you found, she asked? 

Ok, said I. Someone's recently published a book debunking the received explanation for how the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden came to be identified as an apple (after centuries as a fig, grape or pomegranate). As part of his research he compiled a website of images of the fateful scene, one of which delights me to no end. 

It's from a 9th century French illustrated Bible known for where it now resides as the Bamberg Bible, although in Bamberg it's referred to as the Alkuin-Bibel. Anyway, the illustrations facing the Book of Genesis are out of this world. The depiction of the eating of the forbidden fruit in the second row clearly shows a fig tree - and it's leaves from that same tree that Adam and Eve use to cover their nakedness. But beyond the exquisite beauty of the whole thing, something else caught my eye. 

It's in the first row, which shows the creation of Adam and then, in a gorgeous explosion, of other animals. This is the sequence of the second creation account, where the man is clearly created to take care of the garden (2:15), indeed even before the Garden of Eden is planted. 

But look at the trees in that top row. They've all been pruned! That's how, I'm suggesting, everyone used to know that well-tended trees looks like. Trees in this world don't take care of themselves. If Adam is made in God's image (1:27), it's in the image of a gardener!

Semi-mythical

I'm chuffed to have a cameo in this project from a class which invited students to invent some myths about the Lang courtyard.

Embrace

q

After another extended brainstorm of terms - this time words they associated with "ecology" - the Religion & Ecology class decided to take advantage of the warmer weather for a first visit with our kin in the courtyard below. What shall we do down there, I asked? "Hug them!"

Incline

The courtyard looked different today. It emerged that three MA Interior Design students, originally from India, had created a multisensory experience inviting passersby to experience a day in the life of a graduate student. I tried it, walking - barefoot! - across materials representing the challenges and comforts of a day, apparently in a somehow Ayurvedic way, accompanied by little plastic cups, tied to the trees, full of warm spices, and rewarded, after I made my way gingerly across dried leaves, cork, cotton, foil, tea powder, shattered terra cotta and eggshells, with a warm cup of chai. (For no reason I can quite discern, my camera inverted the middle of these pics I took.) 

Saturated colors

First rain in over a month makes the remaining fall colors pop!

Solace