One Thing Changes Another

Each separate being in the universe
returns to the common source.
Returning to the source is serenity.

Tao Te Ching, 16
Stephen Mitchel, tr.

He lived in the house down the street. I only ever saw him when he passed in a car, and that was rare. The only thing I ever heard about him was that he was unhappy, especially since his wife had passed.

The tree stands at the corner of our house in the front. From late fall to early spring, it looks dark and like a thousand skeleton fingers reaching up toward the sky, cold and unfeeling. 

One day, before we are quite aware that it’s spring, this Japanese Magnolia suddenly explodes in color with flowers that are pink and purple and magenta. The flowers, the size of your hand, open so fast you can almost hear them.

One such early spring day, I came home from work, and he was standing in my front yard, the unhappy old man whom I really did not know. I got out of my car. He turned with a look on his face like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His English was not so good. “I just wanted . . . so beautiful . . . I’m sorry . . .” and he started to walk away.  “Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it?” I said.  And he stopped.  He smiled. There were tears in his eyes.  He told me he just wanted to get close to the tree.  He wondered if he could take a picture. I reassured him.  He could take as many pictures as he wanted, and he could visit the tree in my yard whenever he wanted to. 

A summer or two later, word came of his passing. His children were gathering at the house.  We looked up their culture’s traditions around death and found that a basket of bread and fruits was a common expression of support at the time of death, and so we went to the door.  His son greeted us.  A smile and a tear in his eye looked familiar to me. 

And this is a story about how a tree, and some flowers changed me, changed him, a little bit, and made us a little more neighborly than we had chosen to be on our own. 

The other day, I looked out the window. It was happening again, the explosion of colors. 19 times this has happened.  19 years, this tree which falls asleep into the source each fall, remerges to invite us into life. I thought of him, standing in my yard, moved by the glory of this tree. Gratitude in my heart. A smile on the face, a tear in the eye. One little thing changes another. 

~Bob Patrick