The forest, in this case, is the dense interconnected material surrounding the day to day work of trying to save trees.
The project I've become immersed in as a member of the Ontario Urban Forest Council is all about protecting trees, especially old, full-grown trees, from destruction by developers with limited vision about what matters on this planet. For the past two weeks I've been working flat out on promotional material, a slow and often frustrating process involving multiple communications, problems, minor then major snags, trying to get the essential material printed before leaving on holiday. One small but important detail remains missing despite three days of trying to get that detail from another organization, and I've been trying not to think of the old saying, "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of the horse, the rider was lost; for want of the rider, the battle was lost . . . . ." hoping that when I return the nail will have been found and the battle will carry on.
In the interim I've been taking care of other smaller jobs, and another large one, and feeling less like a writer than a juggler. My reading has also been neglected and I'm now a splendid example of the way in which a human mind bent on organizing the kind of complex interchanges I've been bent on the past two weeks, becomes drained of creative energy. Don Quixote has been left stranded on page 166, in fact reading of any kind has been desultory, too lean a literary diet for sustenance of the kind I need.
Meanwhile the magnolias have been blooming and are starting to lose their petals, the crabapple trees are coming into flower, trees everywhere are bursting with new green growth, and tomorrow I'll be looking at some of Ottawa's two million tulips in its annual tulip festival.
With tulips in mind, and the flower's coming to prominence in Europe from 16th century Turkey, come a chain of thoughts: a friend now visiting Turkey after an eight-year absence of a place she grew to love after working there for five years, of my conversations with her often including tales of Hoja Nasruddin, and the fondness of storytellers for tales of Hoja, of my fondness for storytelling: now the quest is to find a Hoja story about tulips . . . .and to fill my senses with two million tulips.
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