The Tortured Tree

I knew a lady who painted portraits of her children and grandchildren, as well as landscapes, seascapes and occasionally impressionist and still life paintings. She clearly had talent, but it had been thwarted initially, by a backward and myopic father who died only weeks too late to not deny her the acceptance of a scholarship and attendance at a prestigious and excellent art institute of learning while still in her teens. This particular injury to her opportunity and future was irrevocable when added to circumstances such as economic demands, marriage, children and all the other usual responsibilities of these realities together with running a household and helping with the family business. But like a healthy and vigorous plant not permitted the proper sunshine and nutrients to its surrounding soil, she grew in spite of these shackles that, rather than dragging her down, made for a more interesting and remarkable living thing, i.e. her art, its twisted form triumphing through the fruits born of its own special trial and tribulations. Yes, she neither became another O'Keefe nor a Cassatt, but the purity of her art and wounded but undefeated purpose allowed her to abide. Over the years, with no bitterness detected by me or anyone who ever knew her, the results of her labor were somehow more beautiful objects of beauty precisely because of strictures and oppressions.

We have all seen the indomitability of nature. The mimosa trees growing wildly up against chain link fences in my father's backyard for many years, uncomplainingly produced what was their collective destiny with the intimate aid of photosynthesis and blessed rain. That is, hardy wooden trunks grew through and around the iron links and anything akin to a description of the sight as those of somehow crippled vegetation or a perversity of nature, compared to a freely growing tree, misses the mark and fails to see the drama of constraints and how human nature as well as that of simpler forms of life courageously strive and overcome.