Nikon Loves Trees

I love trees.  They secure their roots underground, provide shade for people and branches for birdies, and have been the subject of countless Japanese haiku.  There’s something primal and Zen about trees.  My own house has a forest of trees around it; during the summer you can’t see the house from the road because of the sixteen trees in our yard.  You read that right.  We have 16 fully grown trees in our yard.  Ten of them are cottonwoods.  I helped plant most of them when I was a kid.  We didn’t realize that trees have a habit of getting a lot bigger and didn’t do too much about the whole “spacing” issue.  Oops.

Speaking of trees, I have a new Nikon S630, thanks to Connor trying to get a close-up of Sophie coming down the slide with our 4-year-old Olympus.  We repaired the Olympus last summer after Sophie dropped it on the cement at the zoo; this time, the damage was too great to justify repairing it.  I said a fond adieu to the Olympus and an eager hello to the cute little Nikon from Costco.  I’ve wanted a little camera that I could slip in my pocket since I started running.  Thanks to my little boy who doesn’t understand that moving objects (and people) tend to stay in motion coming down a slide, I finally got my coveted new toy.

We went camping at Dowdy Lake for Connor’s seventh birthday this week.  I’ve been working my butt off this summer (that’s a whole nother blog post) and all the “Zen” in my running has moved out for the season.  I’m tired, tired, tired.  I’m crabby when I wake up in the morning thanks to my overly active brain and endlessly poking Bill to “turn over” to stop his snoring.  (The snoring is what got me up out of bed this morning after five crappy hours of sleep, by the way.)  Summer means long days and not a lot of down time for this busy Momma.

I went for a long meander around Dowdy Lake with my new camera the day we got there.  I wanted to play with the settings and see what the thing could do.  I love taking pictures, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, but if I try long enough I can usually get a good shot of something.  Sophie started walking with me but stalked off after Kirby’s leash got tangled around my neck when I squatted down to take a stupid picture of some sage and I got mad about having a leash tangled around my neck.  Nice going, way to run off your adolescent daughter who wants to spend time with you.

Kirby and I kept going.  I was going to walk this lake until I stopped being mad, be it one lap around the lake or ten.  This was bullshit.

I came upon a rocky outcropping and went over to investigate.  Not only was it a beautiful view, but there was a totally non-descript pine tree growing straight out of the rocks.  The boulders were huge and tumbled one upon the other, and this particularly zealous pine tree had large tangles of roots that were digging deep into the rocks and securing a toe-hold on life.

Maybe it was my bad mood, maybe it was my search for a photography subject, maybe because Jupiter was in retrograde and I was PMSing enough for ten suburban women, but that tree caught me up short and did a dance on all my bubbling piss and vinegar.  I hate it when people talk to themselves but at that moment in time there was no one else around to call me on my shit so I had to do the honors.  “You’re so busy waiting for all the conditions to be right so you can start your living that you’ve forgotten to dig deeper and see what’s right under your own feet.  Open your eyes, fool.”

Every life is based on a foundation that either supports life as you know it or supports a life as you haven’t yet experienced.  People thrive in all sorts of conditions.  Sometimes the conditions look like an Amazonian rain forest and sometimes they look like Death Valley.  The thing is, the rain forest and the desert support life of some sort.  Various species have the creative work of figuring out how to adapt to the conditions and get on with the business of living.

In honor of the tree that helped me gain a little bit of perspective this week, here is my utterly lame attempt at haiku:

Camera captures

Roots embedded in hard rock

Eyes and heart unfold.