Trees

I was reading from Marilynne Robinson's book, Gilead, this morning.  This passage struck me about trees:

"As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial - if you remember them - and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost.  There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they'd fly past my head.  All this in the dark, of course.  I remember a slice of moon, no more than that.  It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail.  I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me.  I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me." (56-57)

I wonder if any trees have astonished you lately.  The one by Trees' Steakhouse astonished me again recently.  There's a big tree in an apartment complex off Old Kings Road where the roots were nearly yanked out of the ground from the October 2016 storm.

Joshua Hochschild talks a lot about trees in his essay, "How to Look at a Tree" which is published in the June/July 2017 issue of the magazine First Things (firstthings.com)

"Across the road from my house, presiding over a patch of lawn between my parish church and the old schoolhouse, there is a chestnut tree.  I cannot say that the tree is particularly important to me; days can go by without my looking at it or taking any thought of it.  And yet, if I turn my attention to it, I realize that my experience of this tree is bound up with much of what I know about where I live, my family, and the history of my country.  I have sat in the shade leaning against its rough, ridged bark, noticing how its roots distend and break through the surface of the soil, as I read a book or watch my children ride their bikes.  Every fall, I have kicked the prickly hulls, drying from yellowish green to rusty brown, that fall on the path that takes me and my family to Sunday Mass." (40)

Even in this short passage, Hochschild is preoccupied with the tree, but he is also preoccupied with how we pay attention.  It is difficult for him to reflect on the tree without also reflecting on memories, associations, people who are somehow connected to it: "My musings about the tree are inseparable from a sense of myself as a father, a member of a parish community, and a participant in a larger ecological and political history." (41)

He goes on to ask how we pay attention in our increasingly distracted age.  How does my smartphone affect the way I pay attention?  It is a "device of distraction."  It turns out that the economy is noticing too.  He writes about Dopamine Labs, which helps software developers design their apps to be addictive:

"Dopamine Labs and its clients in the market for your attention presumably do not want you to stop and contemplate this simple truth: Not all habits are good habits.  But what is the difference between distraction and responsible attention, between mind-numbing watching and mindful seeing, between losing oneself in keeping up with the next thing and finding oneself in meaningful relationship?  We need an account of virtuous and vicious habits of attention." (43)

I'd like to figure out the difference between "mind-numbing watching and mindful seeing."  Do you and I see ourselves as the main character, the hero, and all the people, rocks, trees, rivers, and animals, and books, and gravesites, and all those who have passed on are are just supporting characters for telling our story?  I hope not!  But my eyes are a little more opened to how distracted I get.  And there sure is something frustratingly shallow about surfing around on the surface of the world on my smartphone all day.  Like Malcolm Guite puts it in his poem, "O Radix":

"We surf the surface of a wide-screen world
and find no virtue in the virtual
we shrivel on the edges of a wood
whose heart we once inhabited in love." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 73)