Moral Dilemma

A term I was unacquainted with. Is it perhaps too philosophical for me? Makes sense though when I figured out what it meant.

So you have a house, a really old building with which you have fallen in love . It’s lovely but obviously needs to be seen to, needs repair, needs love. And next to it there is an old elm tree with roots creeping up along its side. They complement each other. And you love the tree that has come through storms and tells us of its past.

 Yet there are those who say you should cut down the tree – perhaps because those roots are trying their best to be part of the house? Perhaps because the house would be better off without the shade cast by the tree? But no that’s not possible. It is what they call a moral dilemma. You love them both and the tree must stay! We will do our best to fortify the house but must leave its companion tree. For that is what they are, companions and one cannot exist without the other. The tree did not ask to be in that place but somehow belongs there. As do many other trees of our acquaintance.  Trees are living beings – for John Muir his old-growth redwoods were like a mother surrounded by her children.

Trees. Trees. How important they are and not just ecologically but in our lives.

My electrician friend came to put in an electric light over the driveway so I could see who was coming to the house at night.  He climbed up the old chestnut tree and before boring a hole to fix the cord, asked the tree for forgiveness. But then he was a particularly sensitive young man who after his sister died carried her little dog up and down four flights of steps several times a day since it could no longer do it on its own. He also walked the pilgrimage route of Santiago de Compostela, but by himself, on his own. And that is what a pilgrim must do.

Then there was my woodsman, Francesco, who came often to cut my riotous bamboos and my too flourishing grass, careful to leave the rare wild orchids standing. He told me of a man who had bought a villa nearby and called him in to fell a tree “because it cut off his view of Orvieto”. No way, said Francesco, and throwing down his chain saw at the base of the tree, he left.  Just as he advised me to let the red-leafed maple down by the garden grow high and free.

Clives James waited to see his Japanese maple burst forth in a flame red before closing his eyes on the world. And come autumn Pico Iyer let himself be engulfed in the Japanese red maples in his home in Nara, Japan.  The V&A once had an exhibition, or installation,  – Forest without leaves – by Abbas Kiarostami. The accompanying poem,  “The garden of leaflessness,” attributed to Mehdi Akhavan Sales, a notable Persian poet, has become part of my forever mental library.

“Holding its sky tightly in its arms, the cloud,
wrapped in its cold, damp sheepskin.
The garden of leaflessness, is alone,
day and night, with its pure, forlorn silence.
Its instrument the rain, its anthem the wind.
Its clothe is the cloak of nakedness.
And should it need a garment other than this,
the wind has woven many a flame of gold warp and weft.
Let it grow, or not, whatever wherever it wants,
or does not, there is no gardener or a passerby.
The garden of the downhearted
does not await the arrival of any Spring.
If no warm beam of light emanates from its eyes,
and if no leaf of a smile grows on its face,
who says that the garden of leaflessness is not beautiful?
It foretells of conifers touching the sky,
now asleep in the coffin beneath the earth.
The garden of leaflessness, its laughter is tear-tinged with blood.
Eternal, aloft his wild-mane yellow horse,
swaggers therein the king of the seasons, the Autumn.”

So should one cut the tree or leave it even if it may endanger the house? Or perhaps somehow move the house elsewhere? This is indeed a moral dilemma to which there is really no solution. And I shall leave them both.