Look! a tree
by Gabriel RosenstockOriginal Language Irish & English
Look! a tree
is becoming the spirit
of the wind
 | -- from Haiku Enlightenment: New Expanded Edition, by Gabriel Rosenstock |
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/ Image by Dave Goodman /
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I was a young child in Oregon, and I remember loving trips to the coast. Unlike the beaches I knew later in Southern California, the coasts of Oregon are moody and windy, places for a child to find scuttling crabs darting among the rocks and wonderlands hidden in tide pools. Sturdy windswept trees would lean over the bluffs keeping watch over the rolling tides.
You would think long years and decades of standing in the wind currents driving in off the Pacific Ocean would cause some of these trees to lean back, with branches swept behind them like tendrils of hair fluttering in the wind. But I usually saw the opposite: These sturdy trees would brace themselves and reach forward with practiced determination. Season after season the wind rushes through the tree's arms, and the tree slowly learns to stretch forward toward that embrace... and, in so doing, embodies the spirit of its challenging, intangible beloved.
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