I see this tree every day when I go to work, when I leave work. And every time I see it I want to cry. It’s a pecan tree and, before it’s middle got hacked out to make room for the wires plunging down the street, it must have been oh so elegant. Is elegance not permitted here? Here on Tillery Street? Here on the East side where the bus comes from Mexico and the church on the corner has a hearse in front of it almost every week. Where I live, not so far from the Arboretum, the wires are underground, and the trees are free to dance in the wind. How would it be for the people on Tillery if their trees could dance in the wind? Must the wires always have the right of way? Or could the trees be trimmed with love? Is it a question of ‘ownership?’ But then, whose woods are these? Or is it ever thus? And is that what fuels our art?
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformed, and some scare see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself”
— William Blake, 1799, The Letters.
