November 16, 2022
Data
The cherries are still on the tree. I’ve taken one down to examine it further, but the others still hang on bare branches. The branches, near the buds in particular, are lightly frosted. The tree feels increasingly solid. For some reason I continue to feel as if the cold will make the tree feel more fragile, but instead it feels more solid.
The cherries have changed since my last entry. They are now very shriveled and darker in color. Burgundy, perhaps. After thawing they are soft to the touch. The inside is a brighter red than the outside and, upon opening, the cherry is very fragrant and lovely.
Affect
This time of year is when it is easiest for me to slip back into non-attentiveness. Without new growth or changing color, I stop noticing; stop paying attention. I am Instagram, not artist; clickbait, not contemplative. I am obsessed with changing and shiny things, things which are cheap but still cost a lot.
“Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what does not satisfy?” (Is. 55:2a).
Perhaps winter trees are not unlike the elderly in our society. Not expecting them to produce anything novel they fall (or are pushed) into the background while we scan the horizon for something young, new, or shiny. It is easy to miss the “wisdom of stability”1 for the endless search for novelty. Wisdom, though, is like the buried treasure – you have to search for it. It is like the fragrance inside the winter cherry – it has to be pursued before the gift is received.
Am I searching?
Sometimes Wisdom is hidden right in front of us but calls for our attention.
Am I heeding the call?
“The Bible,” writes Heschel, “insists that God is concerned with everydayness, with the trivialities of life. The great challenge does not lie in organizing solemn demonstrations, but in how we manage the commonplace. The prophet’s field of concern is not the mysteries of heaven, the glories of eternity, but the blights of society, the affairs of the market place.”2
Perhaps my tree is a prophet. While I search for light-glory, it demands my attention and, more, demands that I become an attentive person, which is to say, a person. It reminds me of how quickly I overlook the (seemingly) non-productive; the buried treasure of the everyday and the beauty which does not fit my categories because my categories are skewed. It sternly prophesies: “Look at the senior, because she is a treasure – and look at me! Look at anything, for God’s sake, instead of looking through it!”
“Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
and you will delight in the richest of fare.
Give ear and come to me;
listen, that you may live.”
(Is. 55:2b-3).
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2010).
Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1983), 117-118.