The Movement of Trees
I had the bounty of visiting old growth Redwood forests in California many times. Once when my boys were ages six and eight respectively we drove down to the Bay Area from Oregon along the Old Redwood Highway. We took detours into some stands of ancient trees including the tallest one that is still standing. It was about as tall as a 35-story building.
On the drive through Northern California we passed a logging operation where hundreds of old growth trees had been logged. My 8-year-old son turned to me and said, “Daddy, someone murdered those trees” and I said “Yes, that’s exactly what they did.”
How can an artist portray a tree in such a way as to make it appear to move? Vincent Van Gogh achieved movement in every painting he ever made of nature as did Marc Chagall. Note how the living Sun occupies the entire sky.
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art. – Marc Chagall
Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. — Warren Buffet
“Flowers swung upon her branches in clusters of yellow flame, formed each to a glowing horn that spilled a golden rain upon the ground; and from the blossom of that tree there came forth warmth and a great light.” — So Tolkien writes of Laurelin, the Golden Tree
The Bahá’í Writings include countless references to trees in symbolic and powerful metaphors.
Bahá’u'lláh, The Persian Hidden Words
The Ridván is a beautiful garden, which the Master had planted in a plot of land which He had acquired. It is on the bank of a brook. There is a large mulberry tree with seats round its trunk. Many beautiful blossoming trees are now flourishing there, also flowers innumerable, and sweet-smelling herbs; it is a blaze of glorious colour and wonderful beauty. The scent of attar roses, of rosemary, bergamot, mint and thyme and balm, lemon-scented verbena, and musk makes the air sweet with their wealth of various fragrances. Scented white and scarlet and rose-coloured geraniums are there in wild luxuriance, and trees of pomegranate with their large, brilliant scarlet blossoms, also other lovely blooming shrubs. Each a symbol of devoted, loving service. — Lady Blomfield, The Chosen Highway, p. 96
After driving for about half an hour we reached the garden where Bahá’u'lláh spent much of His time during His long years of exile in ‘Akká. Although this garden is small it is one of the loveliest spots we had ever seen. Bahá’u'lláh frequently said to His gardener, Abu’l-Qasim, ‘This is the most beautiful garden in the world.’ With its tall trees, its wealth of flowers, and its fountains, it lies like a peerless gem surrounded by two limpid streams of water just as it is described in the Qur’án; and the atmosphere which pervades it is so fraught with sacred memories, with divine significance, with heavenly-peace and calm that one no longer marvels to hear of the traveller who, passing one day before its gates, paused and gazing in saw Bahá’u'lláh seated beneath the shade of the mulberry tree, ‘that canopy not made with hands,’ and remembering the prophecy in the Qur’án, he recognized his Lord and hastened to prostrate himself at His feet. — Adib Taherzadeh, The Revelation of Bahá’u'lláh v 4, p. 29
The zeal and devotion of the gardeners who tended the plants and laboured day and night to make the Garden of Ridván a place of beauty for Bahá’u'lláh to enjoy, was no less striking. The Garden of Ridván was situated on a very small island. The little river, which emptied into the sea, divided itself into two streams surrounding that small area of land. In the time of Bahá’u'lláh the garden was laid out in flower-beds and there were many ornamental shrubs and fruit trees. There was a splashing fountain from which water was fed to all parts of the garden. As it flowed, it came rippling down in a broad stream over a stone platform under two large mulberry trees. The stream which flowed by the island was about fourteen to fifteen feet wide and three feet deep; fish were darting about it in abundance. It was fringed with weeping willows, and the fragrance of jasmine and orange blossoms filled the air. Most of these features are preserved today, except that there is no water circling the garden, for the streams have been diverted in recent times.
Whenever Bahá’u'lláh visited the Garden of Ridván it was a joyous occasion not only for Himself but for the Master and all the friends. The atmosphere in this oasis of beauty brought some relaxation to Bahá’u'lláh as He sat on a rectangular bench placed in the shade of the two large mulberry trees. Many believers attained His presence there, and they too sat on similar benches. Adib Taherzadeh, The Revelation of Bahá’u'lláh v 4, p. 12
I visited the Ridván Garden outside of `Akká, Israel back in 1973. This is a preliminary sketch of one tree in the garden whose movement and beauty captivated me.
This is one of the variations that I developed from the preliminary version.
I collected a few passages from the Bahá’í Writings that mention Trees
Tags: Adib Taherzadeh, Artist, California, Garden of Ridván, gardener, Israel, Marc Chagall, Old Redwood Highway, Oregon, Redwood forests, Ridván Garden, Vincent Van GoghRelated posts
After the Flood
A flood destroyed the great majority of artwork and photography that I made from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. My ex-wife belittled my photography as a waste of time and space. She put nearly everything I had done in the damp basement of our rented house in Albany, Oregon. I was unaware that she had moved my numerous boxes of slides. A sudden torrential Oregon rain caused the water table to rise about five feet filling the basement with sewage and destroying all but a few boxes of my images that sat on a high shelf. I waded through chest-high mud to retrieve them. I was so discouraged and upset by the loss that I abandoned photography for almost 19 years. I continued to take snapshots of my children.
Wading through the flood was a grossly disgusting experience. I saved about 400 slides, three-fourths of which are now on my website. About 50 of them were pictures of my first child, David, who passed away from a brain tumor when he was three years old. Only about a dozen slides from my pilgrimage were salvageable. The rest numbering about 1500 were buried in mud and lost. Following the flood, I was preoccupied with my high-pressure jobs at Intel and Microsoft for a period of 15 years. I barely had time for anything else besides work and my two children. I was their sole custodial parent beginning when they were ages eight and ten respectively.
Nine years ago, I acquired a pro-level film scanner. The scanner had built-in capability to remove small defects and scratches from film transparencies. It took anywhere between ten to 40 hours per image to restore what survived from that period. That represented about 400 images out of many thousands. The scanner can’t do anything about large gunk stuck to a slide or negative. I learned how to restore and retouch images mostly by trial and error. The effort took almost a year.I was self-taught in both photography and computers. I never took any classes in either one preferring to learn from books and simple explorations of the medium itself. When it became a necessity to learn how to restore damaged film I obtained the software and hardware tools and read books on how to use them. I scanned and rescanned many slides repeatedly until my skill level improved and I was able to make better quality scans.
I had to let go of hurt and grief in order to move forward. I began to think of every image as if it was a completely new creation. I was using new tools and no longer relying on a camera, slide copier, or darkroom. I disdain computerized effects and don’t use them. They’re too easy and look fake. When I paint digitally, I use a pressure sensitive pen tablet as nearly all artists who work with computers also do. You can make it work exactly like a real pen or brush so it feels very natural.
Because of a personal tragedy, I acquired certain skills in film restoration and archiving that enabled me to perform a much needed service.
The prizes of our society are reserved for outer, not inner, achievements. Scant are the trophies given for reconciling all the forces that compete to direct our developmen, although working toward such a reconciliation hour by demanding hour, day by triumphant day, year by exciting year is what underlies all growth of the personality. The proper artistic response to digital technology is to embrace it as a new window on everything that’s eternally human, and to use it with passion, wisdom, fearlessness and joy. – Ralph Lombreglia, in Atlantic Unbound
Bestow upon me a heart which, like unto glass, may be illumined with the light of Thy love, and confer upon me thoughts which may change this world into a rose garden through the outpourings of heavenly grace.
Compilation: Baha’i Prayers, p. 71
Tags: Baha'i, brain tumor, digital technology, hardware tools, Microsoft, Oregon, Photography
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Hands (Home Birth)
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
I took this photograph back in 1979 in Oregon City, Oregon, minutes after my son, Ben (Benjamin Elias) made his debut after a rapid three-hour labor. The midwife and her assistant barely made it in time. At that time home birth was common in some areas of Oregon. In the Eugene area about 12% of all births were home births. This picture has appeared in a flyer about home birth and also a short book on the topic. Unfortunately I no longer have a copy of it.
You can see the uncut umbilical cord prominently in the photograph. Just out of camera range was my two-year-old son, Nick (Nicholas Nabíl), who watched with intense concentration. After the baby appeared he lost interest and began to play across the room with a new toy truck. When he was about five I asked him if he remembered the birth. He said yes so I asked him to tell me about it. When he hesitated I asked him if he remembered how big his brother was at birth. He cupped his hands about six inches apart and said “This big!” I told him the baby was bigger, stretched my hands apart and asked how did it get so big so fast. He said, “Ben was teensy but then mommy blew him up through the hose!” So now you know what the heavy breathing at birth is all about!
This image has been on my website for years. Until yesterday it was one of only three images on the site that didn’t have a quotation attached to it. Thanks to suggestions from J.S. it now has one: “O SON OF BEING! With the hands of power I made thee and with the fingers of strength I created thee; and within thee have I placed the essence of My light.” (Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words). She also suggested two other beautiful quotations from the Bahá’í writings: “Verily Thou art the Precious, the Ever-Bestowing, the Open of Hand.” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Bahá, p. 121) and “. . .the mother is the first educator of the child. It is she who must, at the very beginning, suckle the newborn at the breast of God’s Faith and God’s Law, that divine love may enter into him even with his mother’s milk, and be with him till his final breath.” (’Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, p. 138).
Tags: faith, Oregon, Photography
