directing « wish you were here

Tree Boy

March 26, 2009

We are of our stories, made from and by them. The distant and humbling command of our past echoes into our present, future perhaps, and so we play our tiny parts in the ‘everything’ which is greater and more grand. Life, we understand, must and will run its course. We will know loss. We will rage, rage if we have the courage. We may, with keen eyes or good fortune, invite joy to settle over the smaller moments, giving cushion to the space between grief and mundane. But in all this, we must know grace. Seek, amidst the flux and chaos, to sit at the feet of our lives and learn. To learn from ourselves, from those who have come before and those whom we hope will follow. We must cast our shadows long and far, if only to soothe the view looking back. We must better the quality of the day. We must build up rather than break down. Give life. Grow. Make the hope of man his creation before his destruction. Question progress. Know value. Live unafraid of whimsy, defiant resistance even when we seem crushed. Easily written but if not, we are to become inevitability’s playthings and our lives little more than folly.

Here is a story neither political nor purely personal. It is a tale not locked to its time but bearing the gravity of a time. Of a people and a country which know extraordinary loss. Of survival, sometimes, on the poverty of hope alone. I have heard it said that memory takes root half in the folds of our brains – the other half, in the land upon which we live. I would hope that this is what you take from Tree Boy, that you offer surrender to a landscape of memory, if only fleeting; that you observe, that you grow, you, companion of your stories.