The Making of an Image

You were beautiful, you were a hero. You were a king. You were my love guru, my baba, my dada, my dream-come-true-man. You made all very nice and tide. You held a castle on your shoulders, you had no complaint at all, not a single tired day of heat and work. You made me laugh, and smile and taste myself on the tips of your wet fingers. You were like a sun-god, unshakable. Available to all my wishes and fantasies. You opened my sex, my soul, you kissed the scars on my womb. You let me touch your skin and rest my cheeks in peace. You let me build a nest on your chest holding me with your breath and air. Your firm hands untangled my hair and put in order all the unripe ideas in my head. Gratitude. From a love like this - a child-like heart like mine, expected only the good and sweet and right. And somehow i slept in your arms, like a baby, lost in the sweetness and comfort of a warm dream… and the seasons passed…

One year a complete cycle of the four seasons passed and I’ve been watching the plum tree alone. The green of the buds had an agitation in it, ready to become pink. Green-pink buds. I could see in its colour the rush, the urgency to pop and become flower. And when it was finally flower, the sky and the bees and all the people passing by stopped. It had this magnetism, that hypnotic beauty, that scent and softness and that take-me-i-am-yours shape. I could say that the tree was pink, pure pink. The most majestic pink. I could merry that pink tree, so much beauty it held. As if that wasn’t enough it gave soon those round fruits, it watered my mouth before i could even touch my lips on it. So generous, so colorful, vibrant, fertile, that juice of life run from the fruit to me. It could only be good, sweet and right.

Then the pink stopped being pink. And It wasn’t because the bees had too much of its nectar; it wasn’t because we ate too much and not even because of the few buds we pluck out too soon. The tree wasn’t growing pink anymore, not even frenetic green. With the cold winds of Fall, It lost its color and the uneaten fruits fell black and mushy on the wet dirt welcoming little sticky flies. Then after some time not even spoiled fruits were lying there. Not even the fuss of flies. Just dry branches reaching an uninteresting sky with no movement. The tree stood there in morbid silence. Or just silence and nothing else.

It was just silence.

I wander if the tree had feelings; if it had feelings like a human heart or if it had a kind of natural wisdom, something wise in its roots that winter could not reach and it could stay in silence with so much grace. A kind of reservoir inside an invisible golden seed, still unborn, still unseen… but which somehow kept life in such a secret manner that i thought it was dead and it wasn’t. It wasn’t dead, even if it looked like.

Patience is a profound aspect of wisdom. I don’t believe a tree knows that soon spring will come again. It doesn’t know… and it knows it so well. Is not about knowing, is being that which could be known. Like a river flows down, like a tree grows up… it is its nature. I would never have to say to a tree “you must know that you should grow upwards”.

So I ask myself, where is in me that golden seed, unborn and unseen? So small i dismiss it? Do i sit in silence enough? Does this seed feeds itself in this silence? Am i giving it enough silence? Have i lost that secret and absolute silence, which is only silence and nothing else? How much can i permeate in the mystery of the unfolded?

Is it a blessing that love was lived? That the tree was once pink? If i have given my juices to the earth just like this plum tree, i’m sure the earth swallowed it and kept it turning me naked now with dry ugly branches exposed to the wind. Isn’t life’s blessing that i can experience death before dying? A significant death happens only to a lived life of deep devotional and surrendered kind of love. Love, nothing else. Pink, nothing else. Once. Even if in the next spring the tree doesn't turn pink the same way, the seed from the dead fruit will rise very close to it.

- Tiffani Gyatso

[inspiration from Writing class with Barbara Martin] Here it comes, digging in mud to find little nuggets...

Foto used of the artist Frida Khalo's painting