“For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
Mary Oliver
When I return to the USA after spending time elsewhere, I’m often asked questions like: “Iceland, that must be a really different world! Do you get culture shock when you go there?” Well yes, it’s a different world. But the biggest culture shock usually hits when I return home.
When I recently came back to California after many weeks of living in Spain, the difference between Europe and here that struck me most was the American obsession with “winning.” Perhaps because it’s November, I thought. Somebody won the World Series, the elections are over, and now football commands attention. All opponents have been, or were being turned into, “losers.” Is there an insult more dreaded in our culture than “loser”?
So why, I wondered, did thoughts of winning and losing occur to me when I happened to be drawing flowers? I had bought them at a local market because their tall, slender shapes resembled trees. Also, I could see the roots! But they grew quickly and soon the stems would not support the weight of the flowers. Could I finish drawing before they began to droop?
How to pay homage to little, evanescent trees, to draw them accurately, not run a race with them? To pay attention is to search: Erasures, hesitations, mistakes are all part of the process. In this case, I “lost” the drawing. It’s only an echo. So here is the result of the process, the loss. The misdirections, uncertainties are all here, just as I made them.
And yet, the world is still full of doorways to temples, even ephemeral flowers that briefly resembled trees.