Local Sprouts Kitchen and the Bomb Diggity Bakery just opened up a cafe downtown at 645 Congress St. I was so happy to be a part of this community effort, there were all kinds of folks from all walks of life: painting, building, making mosaics, and menus; not to mention all the behind the scenes work as well! The place, the people and the food are great; and they have an area just for kids . . . where this old tree lives.
This is a deliciously emblematic rendering of what could be either a deciduous or coniferous tree and represents for me my earliest visual cue. As a child, before abstract or temporal concepts, I lived in an utterly spatial world. My earliest and most profound memories, those I associate with revery, exist beyond of time and behavioral modification, in other words, without emotional reference. Of the half dozen examples of what are for me the roots of pure pleasure, the most profound is a line of deciduous trees in leaf swaying hypnotically. This is, I know, a common poetic trope and as such has been experienced by so many of us. And I do know folks who are spooked by trees and find their comfort in "the blab of the pave". However, Whitman delighted also in the solitude he found outside the city, and many of his poetic entries in Specimen Days affirm this, "The hillside whiten'd with blossoms of the mountain ash," and so on. I suspect that this is why trees have always acted for me as dream-catchers. My eye, memory's eye, has always sought them out as the continual visual conduit to that long ago child's first contact with a personal form of ecstasy. This is just to say that your mural triggered these memories in me.
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