This afternoon in Palisades Park is as glorious as the one before it. Strollers follow the path and look out at the view. The blue of the sky is as calming as the expanse of water. The sun makes distinct shadows on the palms, on the thick, healthy grass. I'm about to start a slow thirty minute jog. Somehow, all these people enjoying the park, day after day, are strangers. I never know anyone or want to. I am a stranger as they are. This not knowing each other is a kind of privacy. I watch a woman pull up into a parking slot, stop her car, kill the engine, and get out. She hurries. She is headed for someplace. She rushes over to a Eucalyptus tree and, ignoring us, wraps her arms around its trunk. Her hands pat the trunk as her arms caress the trunk. Her eyes are closed. And she had hurried from her car because something about the tree had drawn her. I wonder what she would do if I walked over and asked her to hug me. Then I ask myself, why don't I hug trees? Even worse, I dislike her hugging them. Yet I'd probably prefer hugging the tree to hugging her. If Theresa of Avila in her brilliant Autobiography can write convincingly about walking into a garden and seeing rocks breathing, why do I look askance at this woman hugging this lovely (and maybe lonely) tree? Would I care if she did it in private?
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All Rights Reserved 2012 James P. White (No part of this work may be reproduced, except to quote for interviews and reviews, without express permission of the author)
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