An apple seed blew into the huge, old elm on the corner of Wheelock and Main Street in Hanover and rooted in the elder tree. At the top of the trunk, which is also the base of the magnificent elm branches, an apple tree now grows. When I went to pick up some spring color at Robert’s Flowers, the florist told me to look for the little apple tree, and when I got back to my shop, I could see it clearly from my window.
Right now the white flowers are blooming and it’s easy to see the new tree nestled in the old elm. Until it was pointed out to me, I couldn’t see it but now it’s my favorite thing to look for. Great books will do this for me: they show me the tree growing from the tree.
The book I am most enthusiastic about right now is a collection of Vincent Van Gough’s letters to his brother, titled Dear Theo and edited by Irving and Jean Stone. These letters share truths as meaningful today as when they were first published, in 1914. Here are some of my favorite moments from the letters. I believe they speak for themselves:
Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.
Autumn is coming fast, and that makes nature more serious and more intimate still.
Well, the dark days before Christmas are already in sight, and back of them lies Christmas, like the kindly light of the houses back of the rocks and the water that beats against them on a dark night.
I think that everything that is really good and beautiful, of inward moral, spiritual, and sublime beauty in men and their works, comes from God, and that all that is bad and wrong in men and their works is not of God and God does not approve of it. But I always think the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better and more. That leads to God; that leads to unwavering faith.
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.