The sadness in things

After work, I walked one evening to Kew Green. I was thinking about the dead horse chestnuts and the defoliation on the living ones. I was thinking, as I am listening to John Vaillant's fascinating book The Tiger, about habitat loss and hunting to extinction for skins and bones. I was thinking about the majesty of the Other that we humans seem to feel an existential need to quell, subdue, beat down.

So, I was feeling emotional, vulnerable, as I reached out to touch the tree. And my hand met bark as warm as blood. I was touching, it seemed, a mammal with warm skin. I looked up, saw the tree stretching out like a hand above me.

I looked down, saw a heart.

I was heading across to the elm I had sat under previously. On the way, I saw a man with a very small white dog. He lifted the dog into the passenger seat of his SUV and I ran over asking who the tiny white person was. The dog was old. she had cataracts and a tongue that didn't fit in her mouth but dangled in almost toothless gums. She stood on the glovebox to look at me as I told her what a lovely dog she was. The man said she was a lovely girl and I knew he adored her... and she looked intently at me, cataracts dimming her vision, tongue lolling wetly.

I turned away to a tree breaking up tarmac in its desire to grow its roots.

I realised I was crying. Trees trapped by tarmac. Dogs bred to have heads too small for their tongues. Pests and diseases. Confusion and aging. Vulnerability. The agonising sanctity of being.

The elm calmed me. I held the tree with its glorious smooth bark and sat in the dappled shade of a fine evening at the end of a rainy day.

I felt... how did Tolkien describe it? Eucatastrophe: "a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."