Back in June, while contemplating the wondrous display of nature right in my own front yard, I wrote about the extraordinary life force evident in the plants and trees that burst forth with such intensity every summer, and how I marveled at their tenacity to find a way to overcome their circumstances to flourish and grow, almost beyond belief:
https://johns-consciousness.com/2018/06/09/the-extraordinary-in-the-ordinary/
As the months progressed since that posting, I have been monitoring and photographing my efforts to tame the wilderness encroaching upon my house, and in spite of my determined efforts to prune and chop down the overgrowth, Mother Nature continued to impress me with her tenacious refusal to allow my efforts to completely stop her progress. In the image below, I recorded the winter status of a rogue tree growing right in front of the window on the living room side of the house:
As you can see, this errant seedling had grown beyond the height of the roof and was already tangled in the power lines running from the house to the power pole out front. At the time, I was reluctant to chop it down since I enjoyed the amount of greenery that it added to the front yard, and had observed the changing leaves in the autumn with great pleasure. When I saw this scene in January, I realized that it had clearly grown beyond the point where it was just nice to look at in the change of seasons, and when the opportunity presented itself in June, I enlisted the assistance of my young grandson Alex, 15, to bring it down.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
As much as I wanted to see the leaves on this beautiful rogue sapling turn again in the autumn this year, I reluctantly agreed to chop it down, carefully avoiding damage to the wires, while standing on a stepladder, amazed at the strength and weight of the trunk of a tree that had only been growing for a few years.
Much to my surprise, several months later, in September, right at the end of the summer season, the stump had sprouted an astonishing number of tiny branches that seemed to burst into being in a matter of weeks:
After careful consideration, I decided to let the bunches of greenery play themselves out in the coming fall season, hoping the leaves might turn and provide an attractive image for my annual photographic ritual of recording the changes. It seemed that Mother Nature had other plans. Just last week, my hopes appeared to be thwarted by both the peculiar weather patterns this year, which provided an unusually high amount of rain in November, and sudden cold spells which simply seemed to kill the leaves off:
It was disappointing from my perspective, but also a completely natural development given the circumstances, so I decided this week to just go out there and remove all the dead branches, and noticed that the vines had surrounded the stump, probably contributing to the choking off of nutrients to the abbreviated stump. As I followed the winding tangle of vines, it led me to the brick wall where they had begun to aggressively climb and cling to the front of the house. It seemed that in response to this attack, the only sensible response was to remove as many of the vines as I could:
With the wind at my back, and momentum built up in my determination to avenge the destruction of the greenery, I decided to trim the vines from the light pole which had completely overtaken the light in over the summer. The result was unexpectedly satisfying:
BEFORE:
AFTER:
The swiftness of the change of season this year, and the disadvantageous conditions that diminished the number of colorful leaves, while disappointing in one way, made the necessity of pruning the branches and removal of the vines much easier to execute. Once begun, I seemed to gather a fairly robust amount of energy to complete the task, and once it was done, I consoled myself with reviewing some images from previous autumn photos from years gone by:
One bright moment to balance out the disappointment I felt regarding the doomed sapling came the following morning when I opened the door to retrieve the morning newspaper. (Yes, some of us still like to read an actual printed newspaper!) When I opened the inside door, there was a leaf from the tree out front stuck to the storm door, which was wet from the rainfall overnight–one of the few colorful leaves of the season. I took it as a small compensation for the deficits I experienced otherwise, and I smiled right away and snapped a few photos of it, just to capture the spirit of the moment.
It wasn’t lost on me as I ripped the vines away from along the wall, as well as those which were strangling the tangle of branches surrounding the plants and trees and the lamp post, that Mother Nature will no doubt continue to press on with her relentless pursuit of growth, in a perfectly natural and ordinary way. Even my own pursuit of efforts to curtail the overwhelming abundance of creeping vines and rogue saplings, falls under the category of an ordinary and practical undertaking. What inspires me to conjure the extraordinary view in the face of all this activity is the obvious connection between the living plants and trees with the living creature perpetrating the removal of the overgrowth. My own spiritual growth, which was clearly enhanced and illuminated as a consequence of the almost meditative state required to perform the actions in direct opposition to the implied goals of the abundant greenery in my yard, parallels the imperceptible natural growth of the plants and trees that occurred over several years when my attentions were elsewhere. I can’t help but feel that our natural inclinations in the pursuit of spiritual growth may be directly related to the natural incremental growth of everything that lives. The living spirit of the Earth itself mirroring the spirit within each of us.
After completing my task for the day, I stood silently near the scene and took a moment to simply breathe and be present, reminded of the importance of this very moment now. We must be present and allow ourselves to open to the extraordinary in order to know it and bring it into our awareness.
John's Consciousness 