Nurturing Trees

I spent a week or so researching trees for a school mural project. The idea is each class will be assigned a tree to study. They will create leaves, seeds, flowers and fruit on clay rounds. The rounds will become leaves on a Tree of Life wall mural. I am pretty excited by the project because it will be long lasting and is located in the perfect spot- an enclave covered in shade by a massive flamboyant tree and filled with picnic tables where the first graders eat their snack.

Since my Kinshasa days I have been fascinated by the way humans congregate under and around trees.  It would make a stunning photo essay. The ways people use trees for leisure, as part of business, for protection and cover from the sun. Trees become holders of things, shelves. They become parts of buildings and grow through walls. Trees exhibit a resilience that is simply admirable.

My moringa trees are an excellent example. There are two miracle trees- useful for everything from medicine to cleaning water-growing on my little patch of dirt I call a yard. They grow faster than we can keep up with, every so often stripping them of their leaves, drying them and using them for tea and all kinds of garnishes. I think the nounou was particularly disturbed by the way they shed their leaves all over the driveway. Every so often she would ask if she could cut them. I obliged as long as we collected the leaves for use. I have noticed that one of the stumps has stopped regrowing- highly unusual as they love nothing more than a good trim. I suspect she treated it with something.

Around the same time, I took a few of the chopped branches and stuck them in the earth, trying to create a little fence around my plants (the children are constantly playing and stepping there and I was trying to keep people out of the area.) In response, the trees have bloomed and now I have four moringa trees. It was that easy. That unplanned. The trees decided to grow despite me (or my nounou.)

In more recent days, the prospect of a new president has me more concerned than ever about the environment. Like most Americans I am reading everything I can, trying to educate and activate. The potential problems are overwhelming. This article, before Trump was even elected, merits a link mostly because of what it doesn't talk about. Perhaps history shows that humans have a tendency towards self-implosion, only to come out better for it on the other side (supposing you are not among the million or so sacrificed in the purge) but history doesn't really show us how the environment will fare.

It may well be that we've done enough damage to alter the earth irrevocably. And if we haven't already, four years with Trump's team will surely set us firmly on that path. Of course, the earth will continue to spin, it's just a question of in what state.

All of this uncertainty brings me back to the trees. Each tree I researched resurrected memories of a relationship. The avocado tree with her branches full of fruit, bending low to offer me her gifts and raising back up again at the end of the cycle, patiently growing again.  The star fruit tree at the end of our driveway, offering up its bittersweet fruit for eating, lending her shape to colors for stamped birthday card designs. There were the mango trees, whom I made a portrait series of in all their stages of beauty from birth to decay. And the glorious mountain apple tree who showered me in neon pink carpets as she shed her flowers to bloom forth soft, pale apples. Banana trees and bamboo trees providing sturdy leaves for making art and strong stems for creations of all kinds.

I want to get back to nurturing trees the way they nurtured me. We could all do with nurturing some trees. We are so far from nature we've forgotten our dependence. It's what the water protectors are all about. It's what we all need to be about.

Victim of environment

I've come to recognize these trips to the US as one long assault on my emotional memory. I spend the time in a series of adjustments. First I am reacquainting myself with the life I lived here, the material comforts and ease of navigating about the daily business of life. I remember how to make consumer choices in stores and ignore the extraneous fluff- something my children are not as good at -becoming quickly and easily overwhelmed. I marvel at the ease of crossing streets as a pedestrian (I actually have the right of way- no need to dive into the roadside brush to escape an oncoming taxi!!) I note the developments for the disabled and elderly (buses that lower a ramp to accommodate motor driven wheelchairs and passengers that stand to make room so they can be locked safely into place) and long for that level of dignity to be brought to the African men, women and children that make their way down crowded city streets on their hands or rolling across dirt pathways because they are turned down by overflowing public transportation--no room for their clunky wheelchairs cobbed together from various bike and automobile parts.


I try to fit the pieces of my American self together as I watch commercials urging me to buy, upgrade, furnish, and acquire goods I no longer need or want. I remember wanting these things for my house, my family, myself, but I notice these parts have been shed, replaced slowly by a desire to have things for humans.

As the days turn into weeks, I begin to wonder if I can manage the two parts of myself...the two lives I am living. Naturally, the reflection moves from global to personal. Memories from my life confront me at every crossroad, tugging at emotions I'd thought had long been dealt with. I start to wonder which life is 'real,' akin to Jake embracing his Avatar self as more genuine than the body he left behind. What began as a journey of delight and wonder turns quickly into self-questioning and reminiscence as I greet old friends and reconnect with family.

But the roller coaster is far from finished. The weeks turn into a month and I begin to long for my own space, my familiar pace of life. I must prepare for the journey back and yet another metamorphosis. I must become a bit practical and think of the items we will need to make it through another year in Congo cut off from the quality supplies we can find so easily and cheaply here. It becomes more difficult to remember the things I "need" surrounded as I am by such bounty.

I begin to fear I am nothing more than a victim of my environment. Each space welcomes me with its unique version of who I am and who I could be. Each place seduces me with dreams of an existence that could satisfy my every need---needs that change and morph depending upon the exterior, needs that are defined by the environment surrounding me, needs that melt away as the scenery changes. Adaptation: a human condition that leads to as much confusion as potential solutions.