The Plum Tree
Encounters in Dreams Part 1
Quinta Orizaba
The gate opened onto a paved lane with all kinds of trees, bushes, plants, and flowers on both sides.
On the right, avocado trees, apple bushes, pink and yellow guava trees, and countless other trees and plants spread throughout the garden terraces in that upward slope.
Magenta bougainvillea and other vines tightly covered the wire mesh braided with the exterior boundary wall and the upper neighboring wall of the property. Beyond them, flaming orange-red tops of the lavish flamboyant trees peeked in.
In winter, one-meter-high poinsettia bushes in full bloom covered in crimson the length from the gate to the bottom of the lane where the house was, also on the right. Even the resting area that gave way to the curved staircase showing you into the second and main floor was full of poinsettia pots. Such was the interest in detail and care of the property.
On the left, the keeper´s family house, and beyond the thick, exuberant greenness, you could barely see the bungalow for visitors, an independent two-room apartment with its own kitchen.
Garden strawberries, small red chili plants, and different root vegetables in rows mingled with papaya trees, big banana trees, medlar, and ash trees and, closer to the tennis court, tangerine, orange, and lemon trees.
The lane ended at the parking lots, with the house on the right, the tennis court on the left, and the pool area right in front of them, about a couple of meters higher than the rest of the terrain, governing it all.
On the lawn between the tennis court and the pool stood enormous rubber trees, a pomegranate tree, and one other guava tree.
On the far left, coffee bushes and chayote vines covered the back wall of the property — beyond the children’s swings — , where a coriander vine presented us with some rounded puffy pink flowers now and then.
On the right side of the pool and beyond the house, you could find apple banana bushes, ciku trees, night-blooming jasmine, orange jasmine, and firecracker vine.
One Childhood
Only recently did I realize how fantastic the design of the house was, literally embraced by nature due to the upward slope on both sides. We could even jump from the terraces of the third floor to the back garden where more medlar and banana trees and many other trees, plants and flowers I never cared to know the name of, surrounded an old-fashioned fountain.
Pink petunias, blue campanula flowers — sticky when on the ground — , orange-flame vine, lilac chrysanthemum, honey roses, topaz roses, pink Chinese roses, Lantana Camara with tiny yellow and orange flowers, fuchsia snapdragons, blue and violet clematis, white bougainvillea, red geranium, crimson and gold gerberas, yellow lilies, white daisies, or silver wattle popped up anywhere, anytime. Peculiar plants like red cordyline, crown of thorns — with tiny deep-pink flowers — , American agave, coleus, or weeping Figs were around, too.
I know because my father was a photography aficionado. But I remember; that was my childhood and I was always fully there. If I close my eyes, I can almost walk every inch of that property and recall the feelings with outstanding precision.
A Lifelong Gift
I remember my bare feet and the temperature of the many different soils and floors, and I remember where it hurt and why. I remember the smoothness of the bark of the seven-meter-tall guava trees when we climbed to harvest them. I remember the burns of the larvae at the coffee bushes that crawled into the rubber trees we were escalating.
I remember how my brain bounced within my skull when jumping from just too high; I remember the poor branch of the avocado tree that was patiently watching while we were violently playing with a hammock, and I remember the many times my father jumped into the pool in full clothing because I was stuck face-down in a lifesaver — indeed, I could have drowned.
I remember that mighty electric storm that we watched from the veranda, where the adults used to play dominoes; what a scene. I remember the ping-pong tournaments, the praying mantis, the green and yellow flippers — the only colors available back then — , and the scorpion.
I remember the embracing warmth of that springlike weather, the candles for the pool lit at night for the Day of the Dead, the flavor of a juicy pomegranate, or how difficult it was to reach and peel an orange.
I remember lying beside the pool to absorb some heat from the ceramic tiles after being in the water far too long. I remember that interrupting whatever adventure to eat was always a nuisance, and I remember that the magenta bougainvillea, which was all over the place, was home.
And I grew up knowing that trees were there for us to climb.
The Plum Tree
Right there, in the middle of it all, lived the plum tree -technically a Spanish plum, jocote tree or mombin — maybe a purple one. This Mesoamerican species gives a fleshy fruit with just one seed, generally called plum, bearing no resemblance to the one we all know.
That was — still is — , a 13-meter-tall tree, the largest of them all, as tall as the three-story house with double-height spaces. He had a thick, robust trunk about a meter wide and it was generously bushy when in bloom. His branches extended several meters all around.
Under the foliage of the plum tree, on the side of the pool, one of the first photos of my twin and me was taken, only a few weeks old. And grow up we did, by his side and on top of him.
It was at his trunk that we gathered when waking up when the rooster began to crow at dawn, hours before any adult tried to force us to breakfast. It was on his mighty branches that we built a tree house. It was from him that we threw balloons full of water at the unsuspecting bystanders. It was beside him that we played “kick the can.” It was under his shade that everybody used to sit and watch the volleyball matches, and where my big sister settled down to eat the guavas that had fallen to the ground.
We climbed it over and over and all the way to his top — one of my recurrent pleasures. My father would occasionally take a photo of me from the top terrace of the house; amidst all those leaves, you could barely see my head standing out.
And there he was, silently participating in our adventures, privy to any amount of secrets and feelings; the gentle guardian, the welcoming host, the perpetual witness.
Life
And life happened.
We spent in that campo house countless weekends, summer vacations and holidays up to my 12th birthday, time by which I was already spending my entire weekends at the little-baseball league in the city, playing softball. My sisters and cousins also started their teenage lives; some moved to a different province, far away from Cuernavaca. And all that was left was a longing, one that took an eternity to fade away.
The sweet but blazing memories stayed with me as a reminder of how beautiful life on Earth could be, a gift from my parents for a journey destined to cross a void, a light to switch on in the darkest of hours.
Eventually, the house became a rental for a school, which I finally visited a lifetime later, as did my elder sister around the time — without my knowing. She cherished it so, too.
Trashed it was, the entire property. The color of the house and the pool house was darker and the paint discolored by time. Surrounding the swimming pool there was now a disgusting wire mesh to protect children from accidents. The playroom had been transformed into a chemistry lab, the dining hall split into classrooms, and the back fountain was enveloped in plastic to prevent some kind of reptile from crawling out.
More shocking was to see that the soil was barren; many plants were missing, new and alien ones were in new places, and there were barely any flowers throughout the entire property. Only a few trees at the back discretely offered colorless fruit that made no powerful contrast with the dry green, and the vines weren’t remotely as abundant as they used to be, leaving spots of the perimeter walls exposed.
Yes, the big plum tree was still there with abundant foliage, but somehow darker, somehow gloomy. I took pictures but didn’t pay much attention to him otherwise. If any time had been grim for me, that was it, and the visit didn’t do much to lift my spirit.
The disappointment was not due to the contrast with my idealized memories or that everything appeared smaller than when I was a child; the decay was palpable and real. And I am now positive because of the few photos unearthed from the film archive: that was once heaven. But only now can I see that, back then, every climber, plant, and tree seemed to have consciously put their utmost effort to please us with their abundance: they were truthfully joyful with our presence.
The Dream
A year after I visited the house for that one last time, on August 9, 2007, I had the following dream:
On a fancy yacht, almost a cruise ship, I was attending a seminar alongside a couple of worldwide renowned gurus of communication that I knew well and many young corporate executives. It all looked like a sophisticated war-room spread throughout several stories of that boathouse, and people were doing strategy of the highest level.
I bumped into the leader of the strategic group and told her that I should be on her team of brilliant young planners, and she agreed. We needed to get the paperwork ready.
I was excited and nervous; after all, that was what I had been yearning for since my departure from that corporate job in 2004, and I knew that I needed to act immediately, but something else was calling me. Those floating corporate offices with wooden furniture and white, shiny panels were elegant and beautiful, and I wanted to see it all first.
So instead, I set up on my own and explored the boat, reaching the empty upper deck only to find the area closed. All I could sense was that everything was brand new, as in every other space of the yacht, but it intrigued me as I couldn’t get past the panels. However, a long corridor with no visible ending opened on my left.
It was no ordinary corridor as it was strangely outside the boundaries of the yacht; it must have been hanging in midair, in the middle of open sea! However intimidating, I chose to walk its length, forgetting all about the paperwork.
I was aware that it seemed to lose materiality as I progressed: the solid panels somehow turned into walls made of golden light that intensified their radiance the more I advanced so that the destination remained concealed.
After a while, it finally revealed a bright limitless space that must have been on the mainland. It was a portal. With that one last step, I had left behind the yacht on the open sea and traversed the distance to where he was, the Plum tree.
Awestruck, I was trying to make sense of the scene, and as I struggled with my thoughts, he was waving at me heartily; I could see his immense branches like arms moving up and down like when one is eagerly trying to attract someone’s attention at a distance. He knew who I was.
“Do you remember me?” He yelled, visibly excited.
I gasped.
“How could I not.”
But like Christopher Reeve in “Somewhere in Time,” when he is sucked back to the present when encountering a coin, I swirled back to the yacht almost immediately. (Universal Pictures, 1980)
I would have loved to stay and chat, to know what he had to say, what he remembered, to hug him, but he faded away.
Without a doubt, the sweetest encounter I have ever had in dreams, and an astounding one if you consider that trees move in a different time frame from ours, in such a slow motion that is unbearable and incomprehensible to our human mind. How could he be as excited as any ordinary human?
Because of that, some say that whoever attempts to speak for a tree is lying; one can only feel them, and it takes a very conscious being to do so because the energy is almost indiscernible. But I know what I experienced, and I can only say that maybe this is yet another example of how magical the dream world is; the rules that apply to this dimension are very flexible over there.
More than thirty years had gone by and, until then, I never realized how much I loved him. And it was then that I began to understand that a tree can love you back.
Aberdeem
Proofreading: Norma Ojeda / Colombia
Thank You
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The Invitation
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Background
If you want to know what this blog is about, you may want to read the following post:
If you want to know how the dreaming experience unfolded for me, you may want to read the following post:
If you care to learn about A Thousand Dreams’ origin and destiny, The Launch is the post. The idea came to me two years after I began writing and took shape and gained notoriety really quickly thanks to Adamus Saint-Germain and the Crimson Circle.
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Other than that, in this blog you will find posts about many types of dreams and their relationship to our physical reality. Hope you enjoy them!
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