
This is the most recent entry from my journal. I have watched this Japanese maple for years, sometimes from the chairs I tried to include in my watercolor, sometimes looking up through the leaves while lying in a hammock. I have used its branches to teach my students about stream order in watersheds. There is a remarkable resemblance in the branching of trees and the branching in rivers. A colleague of mine dubbed it "a lightshed."
There are two poems that have stuck with me over the years. Mary Oliver's
The Summer Day and Robert Frost's
Nothing Gold Can Stay. I've also enjoyed reading Wendell Berry. From the Long Legged House:
"We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that i it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to
know the world and to learn what is good for it... For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it."