This is a repost from late Sunday morning. I like to believe one had nothing to do with the other, but no sooner did I post the original of this than the site took a massive dump, and continued to have severe indigestion for several hours thereafter. I eventually gave up trying to respond to comments - none was taking. Thanks for your indulgence. - o.h.
I was out in the backyard yesterday, trimming the palo verde tree and thinking about what a great time all my friends were having at Netroots Nation.
Interesting tree, the palo verde. Very hardy. Nasty thorns. A desert tree. You see them all over the place around Palm Springs and Phoenix. (Maybe even in Vegas, but when I think, "Vegas," for some reason "trees" doesn't come to mind.)
It's a harsh tree, adapted to a harsh environment.
And it requires my attention every week.
When we re-did our backyard a couple years ago, I asked my landscape guy to pick up a 15-gal. palo verde and a 15-gal. mimosa tree.
The mimosa he picked up was 8 feet tall and one inch in diameter the day we planted it. It still is. My wife won't let me change it out for another, beefier one. She's grown kind of fond of it - sort of like Charlie Brown's woeful Christmas tree.
The palo verde he got me was a sort of stunted, lopsided thing, "multi-trunk" by only the most generous definition. It looked like a bundle of green sticks, all bent to one side.
It wasn't the picture I had in my head of what I wanted my palo verde to look like.
At first - horticultural neophyte that I was - I thought, well, it'll mature and grow up and lose its preadolescent awkwardness. It was only after about a year that I realized that the awkwardness was only getting worse: branches were growing every which way, and what I had hoped would one day be a tall, arching vision of drought-tolerant beauty was turning into an ingrown, impenetrable shrub. Something had to be done. If I wanted that tree to look anything like my Platonic ideal of a palo verde, it was going to take some serious work. But I'm no arborist - what did I know about training a tree?
Then I remembered what some great mind had said on the subject - I think it was Leonardo Michelangelo, [D'oh! - h/t to deben for the correction] talking about sculpting the David: you just take away everything that doesn't look like what it is you're doing a sculpture of. Or maybe it was Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, talking about trimming a bonsai - whatever. With that advice to guide me, I figured I could mold our palo verde into the tall, graceful, beautiful vision of a tree that I had in my head. All it would take would be some time and some judicious trimming, paring away at whatever didn't look like what I wanted our palo verde to look like. I figured over time I could coax it in the direction I wanted it to go.
So I started to go out every week or two and nip away at the stuff that didn't look right. And there was plenty of that: the palo verde (or at least our palo verde) is an enthusiastic if undiscriminating grower. Branches would take off in literally any direction, at the most random spots. And because it is a rigid, unyielding tree, if those branches were not nipped early they could become seriously entangled as they matured and stiffened. At that point what would be left would be a tangled mess that would be difficult and painful to wade into, sort out and prune. Better to deal with the problems early.
After a few months and to my not inconsiderable surprise I found that, mirabile dictu, my ad hoc pruning program actually seemed to be working. And over the past year or so our palo verde has taken on a grace and beauty that hardly seemed possible when I began the project.
But since I am no Leonardo Michelangelo (nor even a Mr. Miyagi), I don't exactly have the artistic ability to look at the tree and intuitively know where to prune. I tend to be much more linear than that; I need guidelines. Fortunately, a few weeks of trimming began to reveal a pattern from which I could draw those guidelines.
Essentially, what I ultimately was looking for was a tree that would grow tall and to be free of the helter-skelter inward-growing interwoven branches that our palo verde so desperately wanted to propagate. In other words, I wanted our tree to grow upward and outward.
So when I prune, I relentlessly remove anything that is not oriented upward or outward.
If a branch sprouts and is headed back into the main body of the tree, it goes. If a branch sprouts and is headed down toward the ground, it goes.
Sometimes, when I am in doubt as to the ultimate look that a new offshoot will have, I will allow it to grow for a bit until its real character becomes evident. Then if it doesn't fit into the "upward and outward" vision, it goes. Sometimes it's hard to lop off those earnest, well-intentioned but wayward branches: they have worked so hard to get where they are, and they don't know any better, but unfortunately they are only getting in the way of achieving the vision of palo verde beauty and grace that is the ultimate goal - and so they must go.
And so yesterday, as I'm trimming the palo verde and the hummingbirds are paying their visits to the autumn sage and the kangaroo paws and the day lilies and the lion's tail around the garden, I'm thinking about all my friends at Netroots Nation and the work they're doing and what the goal is that we all are striving for, and I realize that what we want to see is a government that is always being directed upward and outward.
Upward, in the direction of greater realization of equal treatment of all people, of equal justice and equal opportunity. We've moved that way since the days of our founding - because as anyone who knows anything about American history can tell you, the Constitution never granted freedom to slaves, or voting rights to women, Native Americans, non-property holders and those under 21.
Outward, in the direction of greater action to benefit the general welfare, as called for in the Preamble to the Constitution. The idea that the nation as a whole benefits when all of its citizens are healthy and secure is one that the Founders understood perfectly well.
The forces of downward and inward are strong in this nation right now. Downward in the direction of unequal treatment of people on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation and economic class. Inward in the direction of government whose policies serve only to reinforce a philosophy of, "I've got mine - screw you!"
Like the palo verde in my backyard, our government won't attain its ideal form in the next week or month or even year. The pruning and trimming takes time. But as long as we continue to bear in mind the direction we want it to go - upward and outward - I think we'll get there eventually.