When I was active in the LDS church and trying to make sense of the challenges of my life, one talk by an Apostle resonated with me particularly deeply. It was by Hugh B. Brown and used a metaphor of a currant bush that was pruned so it might produce better fruit. In that talk Brown discussed some professional opportunities that he lost as a result of his adherence to the LDS church and praised God for not letting him be successful and affluent. He wrote:
I was so bitter that I threw my cap and my saddle brown belt on the cot. I clinched my fists and I shook them at heaven. I said, “How could you do this to me, God? I have done everything I could do to measure up. There is nothing that I could have done—that I should have done—that I haven’t done. How could you do this to me?” I was as bitter as gall.
And then I heard a voice, and I recognized the tone of this voice. It was my own voice, and the voice said, “I am the gardener here. I know what I want you to do.”…
And now, almost fifty years later, I look up to him and say, “Thank you, Mr. Gardener, for cutting me down, for loving me enough to hurt me.”
I was reminded of that talk as I read a Marge Piercy poem this morning…
A work of artifice
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have gown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy.
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree.
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers.
the hands you
love to touch.
I wonder sometimes, if my life had held different contours and experiences, would I have been a statuesque tree on a hillside?
Or is there something more beautiful to a life where one’s branches have been clipped (over and over again), and yet there are blossoms every spring?
3 comments
I think you are a towering tree on the hillside. And the pruned tree that blossoms. You are both, because you can be struck by lightning, and battered by storms, and yet have the strength to fight back and bloom again once the limbs have been shorn.
I appreciate your saying that so much, Melissa…Some days I don’t feel so tall…
The description of a bonsia tree is appealing, but this:
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain
I find those lines disturbing. And in relation to the Mormon church and in light of their views on women – having very limited and narrowly-defined roles – I’d say it’s better to be the tall tree. (But then, I’m a short, poorly groomed shrub, myself. ;)