Took a walk, Irish and I, down to the coves, through the old orchard and I let her run free of the leash, as I usually do. She didn’t race ahead like a bullet from a gun this time, instead just a nod and turned to trot just a little ahead, venturing farther as we made our way along the trail, sniffing all the news only discernable to a dog. 

Locally this area is kind of an “open secret” dog walking area, and generally, that is who you encounter;  though this time the birders were out to catch the migrants that pop into this little hot spot for a rest on their way towards wherever the winter grounds may be. 

I was not ready to return and so we took a turn out to the road and headed towards the other pond, the East Pond. 

That is where my favourite tree stands, right there at the water’s edge, literally, or liminal, half in and half out, hollowed on the inside, and I have no idea how it is still alive, but it is, and will probably continue to be well after I am gone.

A metaphor of hope, or that’s how I have always seen it. 

So going through my photos from yesterday, and couldn’t help but see a vein of that, a core element in the political crisis in the U.S., of Trumps greed and mean-spiritedness, the deficit rising, the stock market racing up, then plunging down, the corruption at the heart of everything that man touches, and every one he touches.

Can they recover? Well, guess we shall see. 

Some pundit in a vid I watched this morn offered this wisdom; “profit has hundreds of parents, bankruptcy is an orphan”.  So, the rumpTus and his enterprise, his cons, his business acumen based solely on accumulation of wealth at the expense of those who are unfortunate enough to have the pleasure of doing business with him, and ever stained with the stench of his failures, while he and his clan walk away unscathed, profiting on failures as surely as success, it matters not to them.

Can America recover after him and his cronies are done with it? No one can say with any certainty of course, yet I suppose we have to look at it in reality, with truth, that whatever may come, what lies at the heart of America can be described in terms such as hope, endurance, and of course belief. As in all things, that hope can only be balanced with hopelessness, doubt, disbelief, fear, hate, really,  for us to appreciate it. 

Taking another look at the tree at the edge, half in, half out, hollow, yet thriving. Someone at some point even tried to burn it down, and you can still see those scorch marks on the inside, yet, that only seared it, preserved it,  strengthened it at its core.  

Interestingly, this is not an unusual thing, it is not a fault but rather it turns out it is a feature, as many trunks of Sycamores are hollow, and one story notes of a father and his sons living in one;

 In 1744, a Shenandoah Valley settler named Joseph Hampton and two sons lived for most of the year in a hollow sycamore in what is now Clarke County, Virginia.

Wikipedia

A Sycamore with its mottled bark is different from other trees because it is not elastic, and so it moults and breaks apart, creating this camo of green, tan, and cream colouring, and thus to a degree I suppose is even more symbolic, having the look of a soldier standing there at the water’s edge. Arms in the air, in triumph? Or perhaps in a certain exhaustion, of surrender to the powers that be, for now, yet surrender is not death, not an ending at all.   

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” 

William Blake