Meditations on the Cypress Tree Pt. I

Cypress trees hold every person here’s dreams within its roots. long and old, they entangle each other in a dance; it started hundreds of years ago already, and take a form so liquid yet material. For some, it sprouts up as if it were threads in a towel wrung to the extreme, its waist and center of mass squeezed uncomfortably tiny. To others, it torches up into the sky, yet it feels not humanly straight and ideal in people’s dreams – it bends like a spine suffering from scoliosis after generations of a bodily adjustment to strength imbalance. Unlike other trees which grow branches, leaves, flowers, and reproduce, upon the top of the cypress trees and more roots. With an external life, the pineapple moss, dependent upon it, the roots, in its thousands and millions, reach out arbitrarily; some find other roots to continue the eternal dance while some have yet to, looking unfinished, dwelling.

So there she sits, walking through the Ringling Museum. She walks over to the coastline a few minutes away off the side of the museum, and she first feels a gleam from the sun, the air, and the freedom of those in yachts and in the skyscrapers along the coastline from afar; but within one singular minute that moment becomes as far away as the metropolitan coastline is, entrapped from her across the ocean; now the ocean opposes to her – briny and sandy, filled with dead seaweed, romantic no more. 

Hours ago her mom told her that she needs to make up her mind. She ran away in annoyance but it’s as if her mom latched her hand onto her from one hour ago and started bellowing, prove my point, prove my point. Self-consciousness is a powerful thing, and in this moment she notices her perpetually oscillating self. Now she just suckles down the road in shame. How well will she remember this moment, in turmoil and in between cypress trees, 3 years in the future? When everything continues to oscillate beyond its current location? The Cypress trees seem to agree; for them, what we can see is only a moment and snapshot within the long span of their dance – we are limited to the poetic space of that moment, within which we get to dwell. To us there has only been a moment that is the present – looking before the ocean or out the window or down the road of cypress trees, not knowing what life or death or life-in-death awaits. 

Of course she does not think about all this. We all live in the moment yet she wants to live outside of it. Eventually she will learn.