His name was Zoran and he planted the trees.
I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto in the 80’s and 90’s in a large immigrant apartment block that teetered high above the ground. Then, in my teenage years my family bought a house just down the road, the first place that I considered home in this country. I loved this house. It was a modest farm house built in the 1940’s that remembered a time when it was surrounded by only fields of corn and hay and what felt like a never-ending expanse of sky. It’s magic was the huge yard out back
that had somehow escaped being severed in a small piece when the suburban land developers took over. There were many days that I would spend dreaming out back, amongst the many trees, the unkept long grasses and wild herbs, forgetting that I was on a major busy road, and that this land almost overnight had transformed into a city.
We had a neighbour whose lot just as big as ours. His name was Zoran and he had moved in with his wife and teenage son. Longstanding family disputes meant that he had been estranged from them for too many years, and so this piece of land and house was what he could call his family home for the first time in his life. He had come to Canada to escape a civil war, and like many, attempt to rebuild a life in a foreign land.
He was generally a quiet man, but there was something in his posture that told you of a heavy burden he carried in his soft heart. He was very kind and lived a life of service, to make this place the most beautiful home he could for his family. His hands built everything out of the kind of selfless love that is maybe the result of losing everything so dear to you and then by luck or chance or good fortune, being given one more chance to remember what it is all worth.
His way of devotion was to tend to the garden. He adored this garden. He took such great joy in planting many trees of all different varieties including a selection of fruit trees that fed him and us too, all summer. He cultivated the vegetable patch in the back. He had planted flowers that bloomed in many colours and kept the grass a luminescent green at all times. He tended to the garden fully in his retirement years. He cried when the property was sold because of his reluctant decision to leave and be with his now adult son who had built a life and family elsewhere.
Nobody knows the many hours you put into creating something of great beauty and nobody can really appreciate the work you do when your heart is fully invested. For many people, all they could see was just a suburban garden.
Over the years the new owners took care of his bushes and trees. They mowed the grass and picked the fruit. They neglected the vegetable patch which quickly became overrun with weeds. Even though their children ran and played there, they didn’t love the garden. I would say they maintained it, and maybe even appreciated it on some level. They spent most of their times indoors, and the garden was one of the things to do on the long list of chores required to tending to a house.
Just last month the property was sold once again. I met the new owners in passing. Last week when I pulled into the driveway, I was welcomed with the sound of chainsaws, clouds of saw dust, and the sight of branches falling on the hard pavement. The neighbours front yard was in debris. All that the trees and bushes out front that Zoran had so lovingly planted were now turned into lifeless bodies lying inert and dismembered on the concrete driveway. I was stunned as I watched the new owners gather the limb like branches strewn all over without a care or idea of what they had just done.
All I could tell them in my daze as I watched them in disbelief was:
“His name was Zoran. He planted those trees, and he loved them”.
I remembered the glint in Zoran’s eyes, and his smile when he had planted those trees, the years that had passed while he lived there, and while he lived elsewhere, the trees grew, and held their place as a memory of his love and devotion to something that he could do with his hands to make the world more beautiful in his own way. He had long since left this earth, but I know that he would be very saddened to know that his beloved trees were now dead.
“It can take a lifetime and even lifetimes to build something beautiful.
It only takes seconds to destroy.”
Watching the current news at the moment, I am reminded of these words that were spoken to me by my teta Mira, a woman who I considered like a second mother, as she starred at the television transmitting news of bombings and protests in the city of Belgrade in the early 2000’s. Destruction abounded and was even considered victory by some. However, for those living in those places, for those who loved and cared for those places, it was like being drown in a sea of sorrow so big and incomprehensible, that one wondered if life would ever be able to grow its roots down once again.
This goes out to all of you for whom sorrow is the normal undercurrent of your life. And should we call ourselves citizens of this world, dare I say that sorrow is the common undercurrent of all of our lives at this moment.
The questions that I hear often and wonder myself:
What do I do?
What can I do?
How do I allow for the grief, stay with the heart break, the trouble and the enormity of witnessing everything around me that wants to destroy life?
I can’t pretend I know the answer. But, from the years of sitting with many people in calamity and offering them something as simple as art materials, a listening ear, and a capacity to be mindful of their precious inhales and exhales, what I wonder is:
Could it be that when someone is trying to kill the human spirit, the answer is to come back with more spirit?
Spirit, breathe, inspiration, life, prana, colour, song, dance, presence, play, laughter & beauty.
Remain.
Could it be that our obligation to grief is to create more life?
Perhaps Zoran, in his quiet wise way would have looked at the destruction around him, his beloved friends lying dismembered and reduced to fire wood at best, or worse, garbage… and sighed… Maybe he would have said:
“I have planted them once, I will do so again.”
Very familiar to that force larger than him that has the power to take it all away, he would return to the land more humbled and appreciative, his hands would once again caress the sweet earth with his dreams, his love, and his heart break, as he would plant the trees, knowing that this prayer was not for him and his life, but for the vague possibility that someone coming after him, might notice and appreciate the beauty that had grown from his simple act.
My deep heart break and the sinking feeling in my stomach in response to current world events stirred me unconsciously to plant 50 trees on the land that I now call my home (which I will tell you all about in another newsletter). The trees that I planted will grow for the time that I am here. They just as easily might be cut down by the person who lives here after me. In the meantime, they will witness the seasons come and go, some of them might die, some of them might grow taller…
My prayer:
May we remember the importance of the work of our hands and hearts when they are stirred by the depths of our grief.
May our willingness to shed the tears and cries out loud for all that we love be the waters that bring back life.
