A Meditation on Dogwoods
In the spring, the dogwood trees would bloom in a creek near my house where no trails went and no one seemed to know but me. This was a time when I was working 12 to 15 hour days and exhausted because on top of that I had to commute two hours to get down off the mountain where I was living to the suburb of Los Angeles where I was teaching.
It was a bad time or it would have been except that I had my own private dogwood grove and my own private creek because only I knew how to walk cross country through the pines and manzanitas to get to this place no one else seemed to ever see.
In the summer, it was a green grove. In the autumn, it was the only place I knew within two hundred miles that had fall colors. In spring, it would fill with white blossoms that would sprinkle on me when I walked through it.
A place like that can remind you of your humanity. At least, it did that for me. It reminded me that there was more than work, more than me, that I was a part of something so much larger.
That it was private mattered too. It was as though some nature spirit had reached down to me and blessed me, like I could wander into a Tolkein world any moment that I wanted, and I’d forgo sleep some days because it rested me more than an extra half hour in my bed would.
It brought me back to some of those essential truths I had known in childhood but forgot as I grew into adulthood. I hope that those lessons stay with me for the rest of my days. Today, walking in the predawn, I remembered it. And it seemed to me this place had buried itself in me and that forgetting is not possible.
