[ friday, february 1 ]
yes yes, the tree.we live on an arboretum, which is nice because it means there are beautifully landscaped gardens and fun plants everywhere, but sometimes not so nice because we're not supposed to really touch any of the plants. but there's one tree, a twisty, solid kwanzan cherry, that's meant for climbing. it used to live in the middle of the academic quad, with grass on all sides. now that the science center construction is well underway, though, the climbing tree is nearly surrounded by the green metal strips of fencing that almost completely fail to hide the dirt piles and the bare girders and the snorting treaded backhoes from the rest of campus.
at least, that's what it looks like at first. the fence makes a right angle so that it borders the tree on two sides, but if you look closely you can see that it keeps a respectful, if short, distance from the farthest-reaching cherry branches. it's pretty clear that the machine-tracked mud would have covered a rather larger area if not for the tree, and when you stand alongside the fence and look at the conspicuously empty space between it and the sturdy naked twigs, it looks as if the tree itself is holding the construction back by sheer force of will and nature. if I were to go and stand with my feet rooted to the ground and only my hands held out in defense against a bulldozer and a wrecking ball I would probably just get picked up and unceremoniously dumped someplace where I wouldn't be so much of an inconvenience. but this tree, it's just quiet and there and all the yellow metal and neon plastic and grass-stripped puddlemud will simply have to go around.
we climbed it, because after all that's what it's there for. from the top, where I stood with my hands striped orange from the warm winter bark and my feet braced on branches skinnier than my wrists, I could see down into the construction pit, and it suddenly seemed to be filled with only toys.
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[ wednesday, january 30 ]
these have been a breathtakingly beautiful few days; I don't know if the sunny sweet weather precipitated the change in my head or if it happened the other way around. the weekend was harder than weekends should be, ill-timed in that I found myself swimming in just the right depth of insecurity that I needed to be with people but couldn't quite bring myself to seek them out. I dealt with it by curling up in my bed and not sleeping.it got better. some clichés are rooted thorougly enough in truth that it's worth enduring the wilt in their petals, so maybe you won't laugh when I tell you that sunrise came early for me on monday morning. (but maybe you will. I forgive you.) and now everything is going my way; I feel stupidly, gloriously happy and lucky to be here. I was lying on my back this afternoon with my hair getting stuck to fallen seedpods and my astronomy homework fluttering in the wind beside me, waiting for roban to give me a get-back-to-work--poke, and suddenly there was nothing wrong with my life, at all.
it's hard to describe happiness without sounding embarassingly precious, or at least naïve. the default setting on my emotional dial has somehow gotten stuck somewhere between contentment and joy, and to be honest, it frightens me sometimes. I don't know what I did to deserve it, or even where it really came from -- I'd like to think my happiness is the product of my approach to life, but what if it's only circumstantial? it seems almost inconceivable that it will last. even though the double-daily rendezvous of the sun with the horizon is predicted to the minute and printed in the newspaper, this is an unreliable world we're inhabiting.
I think now is when you tell me to shut up and just appreciate what I have, and so I will.
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