The wind sometimes does wander in the back yard, where there is not enough space for its free and sustained thrust. It thus appears to blow haphazardly, blindly, squeezing its wide body through the alleys and raking it over the crowns of adolescent maple trees. The multitude of leaves and long lines of laundry nevertheless give it away, providing so many pointers to the wind’s whereabouts and real intentions. Occasionally, it gently blows from below, lifting the lazy branches and tossing them with determination high above the flat roofs. I remember one such windy day last summer, in either late May or early June, when I watched for a couple of minutes an entire school of maple leaves fly diagonally upward, the pale and soft bellies of fresh leaves passing slowly by the porch where I was sitting. The soft curvature of each leaf, the bright cuts of red twigs, and the majestic motion of the wind are still fresh in my mind’s eye as though this has happened today. But today I have seen the carpenters working on the nearby house, where no-one but a clanking piano lives, cut this very branch to make room for their scaffolding, ladders, ropes, and buckets. The branch now lies on the garage roof beneath the porch, its leaves green, motionless, and unaware of the drying juices that slowly creep toward them. There is no wind today, but there is a slight breeze, and the school of departing maple leaves will forever float in it past my savage mind.

Addendum I (January 12, 1990)

The last two lines on occasion invite a solitary tear, but today the old tear must be sleeping. Sleep tight, sweet tear.

Addendum II (May 1, 1994)

A man cut down a tree one day. A Sufi who saw this said: “Look at this fresh branch which is full of sap, happy because it does not know that it has been cut off; but it will know in due time; meanwhile you cannot reason with it.”

From Idries Shah’s The Way of the Sufi, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974 (first published in 1968), p. 78.