Trees For Contemplation

This morning we went up to FARM 2.6, Pica to feed a couple of lambs there, and I just to check on my plantings. I’m not sure how much clover I’m getting out of my clover field (I do however have quite a crop of mushrooms coming up), but my oak seedlings are doing well. I planted five valley oak seedlings around the perimeter of the property, and so far four of them are budding out or have well-developed leaves.

Trees. Yesterday I went to San Francisco to see upon the suggestion of Dave Bonta an exhibit at the The Contemporary Jewish Museum entitled “Do Not Destroy: Trees, Art, and Jewish Thought”. The title of the exhibit is taken from an injunction in Deuteronomy 20:19 that prohibits the wanton destruction of trees in wartime. This concept has been broadened since rabbinical times to form one of the bases for Jewish environmentalism. I had never been to this museum — now situated near the Yerba Buena Center on Mission Street — and was quite impressed. The tree exhibit was in two parts, the first being a broad look at trees in general contemporary art, the second having more of a focus on Jewish ritual and in particular the holiday of Tu B’Shevat.

Entering the show one sees a sand circle on the ground about ten feet in diameter, covered with what seems to be a forest of two-inch tall trees. Looking closer these are seen to be two-dimensional metal pieces of various plant forms, and getting one’s nose to the ground one sees these to be painted in many different colors. Another highlight from the first section of the exhibit was a 15-minute film entitled The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba.The final sequence of this film is quite striking. It takes place in Laos along the Mekong River as a flotilla of fifty narrow motorboats are being driven downstream. Standing up in the bow of each boat is an art student sketching the landscape in black-and-white on an easel. The fleet approaches a bodhi tree at the site of a monastery along the banks of the river. Many of the students abandon their easels, leap into the river, and swim towards the tree.

My favorite bit from the second part of the exhibit was a short video entitled Grafted Arboreus sabius, or a failed attempt to propagate the Tree of Knowledge. In Jewish tradition the Tree of Knowledge has been linked to everything from wheat to amanita mushrooms, so the filmmaker opted to graft all those possibilities onto a single base. As she puts it: “grafting may be the only way to propagate the Tree of Knowledge, as it does not grow from seed”.