Weeping Walls & Weeping Willows
Fixing my guttering and reclaiming my soul
I’ve just come in from outside. The side of the house where nobody ventures has a tell-tale line of green algae. The guttering needs doing. Looks like the slate we lost in last winter’s storms has clipped the plastic piping on the way down, snapping a few clips in the process.
I’ve never felt more ‘Dad’ in my entire life, explaining guttering maintenance to the family.
And that’s the thing, who we are, isn’t a fixed destination. It’s dependent on our environment and who we spend our precious time with.
Who I’ve been spending time with these past few weeks is my old man who has recently moved into a hospice. Outside his window is a beautiful weeping willow tree whose branches delicately sweep down to meet the water-lilies in the pond that it’s also reflected in.
"On the bank of the Oxford canal...is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air...It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth"[51]
— Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker, p. 111
Richard Dawkins probably isn’t someone I’d want to spend time with and I’m confident he’d say the same about me. Indeed, anyone who sees the world through algorithms, bytes, data, and numbers is not likely to share my vague and woolly, loved-up, ideas about the world.
My father has never shared the same world I inhabit. He deals in ‘facts’ and news and the material world in front of him. Needless to say, it’s impossible to get close to someone who occupies an entirely different orbit.
However, something nothing short of miraculous happened on my last visit where we did indeed meet. It was as though we’d both stepped into the same garden, at the same moment; seeing each other for the first time.
Short of breath and short of time left on this planet my father is going through periods of crippling anxiety as he adjusts to being in a hospice and ultimately coming to terms with the fact that he’s dying.
On my last visit to see him, I told him to watch the weeping willow branches and to notice how the branches were swaying gently with the breeze. I assured him that somehow, someway his brain and that tree would communicate with each other and his brain would begin to settle just as a baby learns to settle by looking into her mother’s eyes.
What I was saying would be warmly received in any yoga studio in the land but let’s just say my dad, whose first job involved shovelling coal on steam locomotives, is not the target audience for live, laugh, love affirmations. This is why it surprised me when I noticed that he was leaning into my words. I was even more dumbstruck when I’d finished my Weeping Willow speech and he replied, “Aren’t trees amazing…they have a purpose all of their own”.
I’d argue that Dawkins centres himself in a very small universe. A one barely 93Billion lightyears across—a universe where trees communicate to the world through DNA. A magical and fascinating world no doubt, but still a reductionist fragment of the world my father found himself standing in that day.
When he looked at that willow tree, as if seeing a tree for the first time in his life, my father had in effect stepped out of atoms and even quarks and into a universe held together by awe & wonder.
I extend the invitation out to you, dear reader. Can we centre ourselves in a much much larger universe? A universe that my father found himself standing in that day when he looked at that willow tree and didn’t exactly know what he was looking at but was simply aware of a very different kind of Knowing.
Ah amazing, such beautiful photos to capture the memories too 🥰 xx