Spring Interlude: Maple Blooms
The trees have become
suddenly very happy
it is the rain…
–Mary Oliver, from Maples
I didn’t make it here last week. I wrote an article, a paper, I took a midterm, I read several dense textbook chapters. There’s only so much sitting one can do in a week’s time; I can manage about half of that, which was halved again by the warm sunshine and the garden chores that drew me outside between my deskboundedness.
But the maples are blooming, which brings me back to the page.
One of the many delights of attention I’ve been gifted by the natural world is the realization that all trees bloom. Not just the showy ones, like the cherries and apples that are covered in powdery pink and white blossoms at the moment or the dogwoods that have only today joined the party. Not just the ones that bear the fruit or nuts that we eat. But all of them. Conifers and alders bloom in cones. And maples bloom in the most beautiful cascading clusters of bright green flowers just before they leaf out.
At the start of last week’s end of term mayhem, Alex cut one forked maple branchlet, dripping with the verdant flowers from both of its ends. I set it in a vase on the kitchen table. So beautiful was the spectacle, I cut a second and third branchlet, each forked in the same proportion as the first with a cluster of blooms at each fork’s tip. I added them to the vase with the first: six maple blooms, each sprinkling their golden pollen onto the table top which, incidentally, is also big leaf maple.
Between textbook chapters and discussion posts and transcript reading I visited and revisited the blooms. Infant leaves, four per bloom, began uncurling their fists in the warm air and sunlight that visited intermittently throughout the week. The tree’s architecture was made apparent in miniature on the table top: the scaled dimensionality of it all, the counterbalancing of the leaves growing in cardinality to each other, the interplay of clear design rules with the chaos of life’s insistence. It might be my favorite bouquet to date.
And now onto an equally busy week (though with less sunshine by the looks of it), with finals and more textbook reading, and, happily, a deep dive into Mary Oliver’s psyche. I’ve chosen her as the subject of one final paper, an excuse to dwell in the natural numinosity that is her style, an apt simultaneity to lingering in my meditation on maples.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” she concludes in the title essay in the collection Upstream. “Oh, good scholar,” she writes in her poem Mindful from the collection Why I Wake Early, “how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these.”
It’s easy to wish these jam-packed days into the past. To imagine a world in which one could arrive, with a snap, on the far shore of a big task or particularly busy stretch having accomplished all that needs doing without actually having to slog through it, fretting about deadlines and all the tasks that linger, unfinished, on the to do list. But to do so right now would mean to miss the maples blooming. And so they keep me company while I slog and fret away, uncurling their leaf tips, one at a time, reminding me of the temporal nature of it all–the beauty and the burnout.
