Word: tree
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Upon returning, I was reminded of the beauty in the built landscape of my home. Think about daily life here. Notice the hollyberry bushes in the Winthrop courtyard or the chokecherry tree in the Dunster one. Next time, while walking to dinner at Lowell Dining Hall, glimpse the beautiful Christmas tree in one the rooms just to the left of the dining hall door. While it is sometimes inconvenient to take pause, how much more spontaneous and rewarding are our days in light of the dapples of humanity we can witness...
...best be translated, "Whatta?") Scripture describes manna as "a fine and flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground," which falls with the dew but melts when the sun grows hot. In June in the Sinai peninsula, a plant louse that feeds on the fruit of the tamarisk tree secretes a yellow honey-like substance that congeals in the cool of the evening but melts in the day. The similarity is not lost on the locals: for at least 500 years they have peddled it to religious pilgrims, most recently under the brand name Mannite...
...takes a moment to realize what I am seeing: a monkey in a tree. To be specific, it is a black spider monkey (Ateles paniscus) swinging through the topmost branches of a ceiba tree in the rain forest in Suriname, the former Dutch Guyana, north of Brazil. Thick-furred, with a red face, the monkey moves by sprawling out and brachiating from branch to branch through the high forest canopy; its long, prehensile tail functions as an arm. It pauses and looks down with the cool expression of a teenager. A monkey in a tree...
...then the thought comes to me that this is the wilderness, not a zoo; the monkey is wild; the ceiba tree spreads its lush green cover in a vast tract of 4 million untrodden acres that constitute the Central Suriname Nature Reserve. Except for the few of us in the camp, there are no other people within a radius of 50 miles, nor is it likely that any people have even set foot in most of this land within the past thousand years. There are plenty of other species in evidence: rain forests contain a disproportionate share of the world...
...cynicism and mocking attitude with an underlying sense of hope and faith in the holiday. Tad is aware of the fake forms Christmas can take on; upon walking into his brother and sister-in-law's showcase of a home, he observes that "the impersonally tasteful X'mas tree Bonny had set up was an X'mas tree, not a Christmas tree...