Let Me Be the Trees

I ambled through a park on a Wednesday afternoon; the place was sparsely populated, with each encounter with a stranger requiring at least a full minute. The sky was solemnly yet gaily blue; the wind was mild, making its music while rustiling the leaves. So tranquil a day, as though all the darkness, chaos, violence, and anger that are currently plaguing the world dissolved away into nothingness! Nature is a God-given solace whom anyone can afford, a call to respite, an abode of happiness.

Each tree I saw was nameless, ordinary, simple, yet beautiful, beloved, and comforting. The shade they offer, the music they make are accessible to all, for their kindness does not discriminate. I do not know them, nor do they know me; they nevertheless are free blessings, nature’s grace.

Thomas Gray once lamented the death of humble villagers in his ever beloved “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; these ordinary folks interred in the churchyard, undeserving of a grave inside the church, may be a glorious John Milton or a famous Oliver Cromwell, yet their lives, equal in worth, equal in beauty, were not sung. I think of them and nature and the trees, and learned how much beauty lies beneath the ordinary. True, the worth of heroes, the glory of kings we do not deny, but how often do we inquire into the nameless, and seek to discover their “celestial fire”? How often do lovely yet simple flowers “waste its sweetness on the desert air”?

I once shunned the idea of being ordinary; “average” was the label I detested among all the names you may call me. “Mediocrity” was my all-time nemesis, the enemy for whose defeat I toil and labor. I measured my success by how well my grade compares with the average, how high my test score is from the median; to be ordinary is to be unremarkable, dull, and to waste my life away, to which I sought to add glory, fame, and accomplishments.

But those trees, those flowers, their shade, their scent convinced me that the nameless can also be beautiful, that though I may not deserve a burial in the church, my virtue may still be sung and praised. I learned that there is nothing wrong with being ordinary — the fate of most people. I do not need “the boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r” to be happy; even if I am ordinary, even if my grave does not deserve an epitaph, even if my name will be forever forgotten and borne away by the current of time, I may still watch the sunset, read good literature, eat dinner with my family, and spend time with those whom I love. I may still count the stars, enjoy a good walk, have wholesome time with friends with whom I laugh and cry together. For all this, it consoles me the most that, even those with that glory I envy, we all do tread upon the paths that “lead but to the grave”. Whether I am buried in the churchyard or in the church does not concern me.

Let me be the trees; let me be the nameless men buried in the churchyard.