Love, Beauty and Green Trees

I learned a lot at school on Wednesday; the funny thing was that most of it was not in my classroom.

I had a number of substitute teachers that day that filled in the void during my usual ten minute breaks. On a usual day, I have just enough time on break to walk outside, remember that there is in fact an outside to this industrial looking box we call a classroom, and then return within, having received the hope of an open plane without ceiling or walls; a place of fresh air and colors beyond the realm of beige and tope, a realm that awaits me after Mathematics. Wednesday however, being overwhelmed by the beauty of nature that was manifested in the campus plant life, I began to one by one be mentored by the trees.

Lately, I have been pondering the nature of love and, more specifically, the vision of romantic love: what causes one person to be so vibrant in another’s eyes, and often, to them alone, and questions of that sort; today the trees aided me in my pursuit.

There are many couples who appear to be very happily married, and yet somehow I cannot fathom spending a week, let alone my life, with either member of the duo. Sometimes it takes but one conversation for me to feel annoyed by how different they are from me (or perhaps truly, how very similar). It has caused me to feel like quite a fragmented human being actually. Why is it that I am so determined to see beauty in only one way? If a particular person is not attractive to me in some sense, I imagine they are not beautiful. Here all day long I will say that beauty is objective and is not merely “in the eye of the beholder”, and yet I live as though people that annoy me are not beautiful. It all came down to this question: is romance a rose-colored lens, or is it simply the only way to rightly see the rose? Does it see more than whom a person is, or is it perhaps the only way to see a person clearly? If romance sees someone rightly, then I really lack in general compassion and regard for others. What if everyone really is who their lover sees them to be?

As I pondered these things, I was enraptured by a very green tree out in the middle of a grassy area. I stood directly under it and stared up into its vibrantly green leaves and towering height. I don’t think I’ve ever met a tree that seemed so alive. I think that trees do sing, I just haven’t learned how to hear them yet. This tree above all other trees on campus had stolen my heart. I felt that I could have sat under it forever without boredom or loneliness. I glanced around and saw many other trees of the same type, but none compared to the vibrancy I saw in my beloved. “Could it be” I thought to myself, “that I have found the most beautiful tree of all?” I decided to experiment. “Perhaps I am seeing my tree rightly” I thought, “but perhaps I do not see the others in such a way that I can rightly compare them.”

I walked directly over to the tree across the way, the tree that, from where I had previously been standing, looked extremely dull compared to my beloved.

Remarkably, when I arrived underneath that tree, its vibrancy, though differently placed because it was a different tree, was equal to that of my beloved; and behold, now the vibrancy of my beloved had faded.

I then became aware of something I had not considered before: it is not trees that are vibrant, but light. What captured me about my beloved was not the tree at all; it was the light through the tree.

A tree is a tree. All trees are beautiful. All trees are different and react differently to the light.

If I attempt to look at the sun, all I understand is pain and blindness, but if I look up through a tree, I began to see some of the colors that the light contains.
Perhaps beautiful people are like beautiful trees; beauty and vibrancy is not contained in a person anymore than green is contained in a tree, but the light that shines through a person is beautiful and vibrant.

Not all people can be directly under all trees at once. Perhaps the point of it all is the light.