Over the years, a mature life will have had its difficulties, its share of pain and misery and grief. If your judgment is good and your understanding of individual responsibility is clear, then your life will almost certainly also include times of happiness and moments of joy.
But if you experience no pain, no misery, no grief, no responsibility; if, up till now, your life has been easy, handed to you by the efforts of someone else; then happiness and joy lose some, perhaps all, of their sweetness. The contrast of pleasure and pain makes life its most interesting. The bad gives more weight to the good.
Sometimes the plight of humans hit’s a little too close to home and we would rather not think about it. So, let us just consider the life of a tree, as though it had some human qualities. And let us pick the tree in the foreground of today’s photograph.
Talk about hard beginnings. This is near the top of a mountain whose face is mostly solid rock. On that mountain, with no shade and no wind barrier, the winters are icy cold, and the summers are scorching hot.
Somehow, the seed of a conifer managed to land in a tiny strip of dirt in a crack on a rock-faced mountain. Blown by the wind, or carried by an animal and dropped there, that little seed fought the odds, weathered the harshness of nature, and sprang to life. And what a life it must have been. Chances of survival were almost zero. The little seed that became the little tree had no choices. It could not leave and go somewhere else to live. It had to do the best it could; it had to survive, with nothing to help it, nothing to protect it from nature’s wrath.
Whether this is the natural shape of this particular species of tree, I cannot know. I’m no tree expert. But it is easy to imagine that the odd shape was brought on by the hard life it has lived. It had a job to do, just like every other tree. And it did it as best it could, given the circumstances of which it could not change, or from which it could not escape.
As I sat on hard rock only a few feet away, on a cold day in October, the sun rose up over the mountain’s edge in the distance and lit up that little tree. I was pleased to see the sunburst through those skinny limbs. So I photographed it.
The sun’s rays felt warm and comforting to me. But I suspect that when the sun rises over this mountain, it doesn’t do it to warm my cold hands as I sit there holding my camera. That bright sun is giving the little tree a warm reward for trying so hard to do the thing that trees are meant to do.
And if a tree could be happy, if a tree could feel joy, then I might have been sitting there on the cold rock of that mountaintop in a special moment in the life of a scraggly little tree.