I consider myself a fairly
outdoorsy person. I love hiking and exploring and camping, love the animals and
the rivers and the breeze. But there is one particular tree that grows right in
front of my apartment… I do not love this tree. Other trees sure-- but not this
one.
My first semester here I spent two
weeks combing my front yard for the carcass which was surely rotting in the sun,
stinking up my apartment. In the end the tree was to blame, or the flowers
rather. Turns out this tree regularly grows flowers which mimic the smell of a
decomposing corpse in order to attract flies for pollination, a lovely addition
to the preexisting aroma of urban Portland.
After the flowers came the berries.
In the fall the death flowers give way to huge clutches of pea sized, bright
red berries. They seemed harmless enough until they began to fall one at a time
onto the sidewalk below, from where they were tracked into my apartment and
squished all over my living room floor. By the end of fall semester last year
this had all made its way into my rapidly expanding definition of normalcy,
however my relative hatred of the tree has persisted.
Today I was walking home from the
Theatre and I was alarmed to find an entire flock of birds swarming in and
around the tree. Given that I would have to walk beneath the flock of birds and
risk being pooped on, I decided to wait for them to clear out a bit. As I was
waiting I noticed that the birds seemed to be attacking the tree. I cheered them
on for a bit before realizing that they were in the midst of a feeding frenzy. I
watched as they darted and hopped around in a mad attempt to feast on none
other than the berries of the death tree. The birds, it seemed, found the
berries of the death tree to be quite delicious. The sight of the birds
frolicking in the death tree inspired the realization that even the most
obnoxious, seemingly useless things can be life giving.
That realization got me wondering; what would my life look
life if I viewed every single bit of it, even on my worst days, as potentially
life-giving?
