Tree At My Window

I sometimes wonder how it is that I can sit looking at the tree outside the window for who knows how long. I’m afraid that I’m wasting time, and if in fact that’s what I’m doing—being lazy—my mother would not approve. My mind’s not doing much of anything, as far as I know.

My eyes are flitting thoughtlessly from branch to branch. I’m lifted by my eyes up through the bare limbs and among the few scattered brown dying leaves that remain after winter. In the summer, all I saw was green, green, and beyond into green. Now, on the horizon off to the right, I see a bunch of  what I think are Arab houses, recognizable by virtue of their strangely characteristic black, empty windows. Stretched out along the horizon to the left are the grey sunlit hills of Ramat Shlomo, which until 1967 the nations of the modern world called Jordanian territory. And all along the view from west to east are the glinting flashes of sunlight on the little cars that are shooting fast back and forth along the line of highway.

The sky is blue, and huge, and lacking any clouds this morning. We’re praying for rain, apparently with not enough sincerity. No landmarks in sight up there to define the borders of the empty blue expanse of my mind, except for the branches in front of my eyes.

Here I sit tipped back in my easy chair, with nothing on my mind, and my eyes are wings, lifting me here and there among the branches, all over the place, hopping with the sparrows from one branch to the next.

At dawn and at dusk, the air explodes with cackling and squawking of blackbirds. How do they know to swoop down onto these branches just before the sky’s first light, and every late afternoon, as day’s just becoming evening? Like clockwork they come and go. I stay here, in my armchair, doing nothing. The tree grounds me.

Tree at my window, wrote the poet Robert Frost, window tree…My sash is lowered          when night when night comes on/ But let there never be curtain drawn/ Between you and me.

 That poem kept me company throughout my high school years. There was a tree out my window in Connecticut, the same tree that stands here now in Jerusalem, telling me that just as she stands motionless and can’t move from her spot, I, too, can sit still for a while yet remain blameless. I’m contributing nothing at all in these long minutes to the maintenance of the world, except for the thanks I send to the One Who fashioned it. The dishes are in the sink. The floor’s unswept.

Rabbi Avigdor Miller zt”l marveled at the fact that in summer, when we want shade, the trees are full of leaves, and that in winter, when it’s warmth and light we desire, the trees are bare. Don’t harden your heart, wrote Rav Miller. Think about what you’re seeing, wherever your glance happens to fall; the bee on the flower is every bit as much of a nes as the Ten Plagues.

The tree out our window emerges upright from the dirt, in spite of gravity’s logic. Its branches let go of its leaves at the appointed time, and drop the dead, dry brown stuff to fertilize the soil. In the profound darkness over which we walk, roots drink their sustenance. The trunk carries water upward, up, up, up, and the buds are born again.

Vague dream head lifted up out of the ground/ And thing next most diffuse to sound, Not all your light tongues talking aloud/ Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed/ And if you have seen me while I slept, You’ve seen me taken and swept and all but lost.

In the poem’s final stanza, the poet speaks of Fate, but in my own mind, (forgive me, Mr.  Frost) I’ve edited those words without permission, to read as follows:

That day He put our heads together, G-d had his imagination about Him,                                Your head so concerned with outer; /  Mine — with inner weather.

—

This piece appeared first in Ami Magazine.