I'm told the prior resident here snuck over a fence behind this Mission district house into a garden attached to an auto body shop. He planted a black acacia tree there decades ago. When the tree became an overgrowing arboreal menace, it was chopped to a stump. He the planter prayed and meditated hard that day. The stump was ignored and over the ensuing years, the tree grew back without supervision: as seven trunks, a huge canopy three stories tall, visible from San Francisco's hills and sheltering the spaces below which bustled with hawks and rats.
As more people packed around it, the tree was deemed too large: roots were lifting a neighbor's concrete; limbs or whole trunks might have broken off to commit rooficide.
I loved looking out our back window and seeing branches and leaves. Now, a year and a half after I first moved a chair to where I could sit and see that tree, three days of chainsawing by a man on ropes reduced it to a stump once more. Younger men covered the wood wound in mulch and left it.
Ilyse and I wondered if tree-bound meditation and prayer should once again be deployed, touching upon the spiritual side of the otherwise secular Arbor Day, which appears in 40+ countries. Perhaps we'd pray for forgetfulness from our neighbors, so the stump might re-re-grow. And, we'd likely raise our voices amidst the many in this part of the world praying for water.
But instead of bringing rain, our water prayers could cause sea levels to rise to our front steps. And instead of summoning leaves outside our window, this tree could continue to invade our lives. Fed by our prayers and meditation, this tree could soon drive us from this warm box. Seems easy to cut and hard to know. But out my window I do prefer branches and leaves to the rump end of a storehouse.
