Cedar Potpourri
Sylvia Shawcross
At the front of my hovel is a cedar bush long overgrown now. The birds love this bush and often nest there. The robins love it most of all for some reason. The scent of cedar is like no other. You can crush the leaves and transcend reality for a little while with that aroma.
It speaks of a wilderness of nature much like the fertile rich scent of fresh earth after a heavy rain.
The reminder of our existence in nature is all around us, even as we plod our ways to the cities like vagabonds cluttering the machinery of civilization begging for our pay checks. We don’t belong there. We are just passing through. And that is a realization that usually comes late and at a price for us humans.
It was always this way perhaps but it seems more pronounced these days with the threat of 15-minute cities and any wild nature around us to be relegated to occasional holidays.
The cedar bush is wet with the heavy rain which is a remnant of some hurricane no doubt. When it rains you can almost smell the cedar in the wet wind and that reminds me of the Esh-Shouf Cedar Reserve. I’ve never been there and likely never will be but for some reason cedar always reminds me of Lebanon’s Cedars. I think of it looking at people’s cedar decks or young bride’s cedar chests.
I’d like to say it is a case of old people when everything reminds them of something else so in fact old people never really do experience anything in real time anymore. But that is not the case here. I have always been this way with cedar.
Esh-Shouf Cedar Reserve is in the middle of Lebanon containing 25% of the now endangered famous cedars of Lebanon. Whenever the cedars of Lebanon are described there is a feeling that washes over me, a residual biblical thing perhaps or a sense of time and history or maybe even a past life memory if you can believe in such things.
And I’m reminded of all this because even as I write, in the corner of my screen I am watching bombs going off in a place called Tyre, Lebanon. It is that ancient grievance and tit for tat horror that seems to deluge the Middle East regularly. No one wins.
But it is always believed that war is peace and it isn’t. It is just war. It is a tribute to the failure of diplomats and government panic and the greed of the military industrial complex and banksters and privileged others. That is all it is. People die on both sides and the world continues on, even more cynical about human nature than we’ve been before. No one knows how far humans will go with this war. We shudder to think. So we don’t.
But there, on the screen is a beach in Tyre with a turquoise sea washing a scalloped damp fringe into the sands and in the far hills the bombs make grey smoke to the sky. The area is a World Heritage Site for archeological finds and nature in some cases, not that these designations seem to matter when it comes to war for any region of the Middle East.
Up there, in those hills I imagine there are some cedar trees. They were used by Solomon to build his temple, it is said, and underneath them one can easily imagine Alexander the Great pacing the soft ground thinking about his empire. Or perhaps the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu cutting down villains and trees in their Cedar Forest. And the Phoenicians building their ships.
I wonder what they’d all make of the bombs overhead now. I suppose it doesn’t matter. It is all the same. Then and now. Why is it that humans will blow the past into smithereens in order to create a future? The disconnect between the past and the future is why we never win. We muddle our present in rhetoric and emotion and unbridled greed and power. We never learn.
But that being said, we must remain optimistic that we can learn. Some day. I don’t know how. It has all been tried before. But perhaps someone knows. Or perhaps it is all playing out as pre-ordained. How do we know?
Here’s an earworm I’ve done before but I don’t care anymore.
Well…today anyway.
Sylvia Shawcross is a writer from Canada. Visit her SubStack if you’re so inclined.
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Cedar played a key role in the construction of Solomon’s Temple. The cedar logs hewn from the mountains of Lebanon being floated down the Mediterranean Coast from Tyre to Joppa and from there inland to Jerusalem.
Hiram (whose name in Latin means ‘living exaltedly’), King of Tyre, was a long-standing friend of Solomon’s father David. He thus made a good trade partner for the necessary timber. He received wheat & oil in return for his cedar & gold. Tyre is related to ‘Tyrus’ (and to ‘strength’, ‘rock’, ‘sharp’), from which we get the word ‘tower’.
Similarly ‘Gaza’ (or ‘aza‘) in Hebrew means ‘strong’. The subduing of these territories is thus like the subduing of human strength and pride; the hewing down of large towering cedar trees or Goliaths for constructive, more noble purposes.
Solomon, whose name means ‘peacemaker’ (cf Shalom, Salaam) was allowed to build the Temple, whereas his father David was not permitted to do so, being too much a man-of-war. Solomon’s reign (unlike David’s) was characterized by unbridled peace and he was the only ruler of Israel, at least to my knowledge, to have actually reigned over the whole of the Promised Land.
Netanyahu, being a protégé of David [ben Gurion], may like the aforementioned David have shed too much blood (at least indirectly) to be worthy of rebuilding the Third Temple – a more peaceful successor may perhaps prove worthy in more peaceful times.
Thanks. That brought back some very good memories. 20 years ago my wife and I were living in Qatar and took our Spring break in Lebanon. My thinking at the time was that when a Middle Eastern country prone to war is in a lull of peace, seize the opportunity and go see as much of it as you can. We drove from Tripoli in the North to as far south of Tyre as we could, a UN checkpoint that would allow us to go no further. I had my surfboard with me, which caused confusion at the Syrian Army checkpoints, but also gave me the opportunity to join the locals in the water and engage in an activity that had as little to do with war and death as can be imagined. I probably even surfed that golden beach outside Tyre that you mentioned in your essay. The people were as welcoming and as friendly to a couple of lost Canadians as you can imagine. We were welcomed into homes for tea and welcomed to the country everywhere we went. The little Christian mountain towns in particular were very friendly. When put in to context of the brutal fighting that they’ve endured over the past decades it gives you the impression that the Lebanese can survive just about anything with their culture and humanity intact. After a visit to Baalbek we found the cedar reserve too late in the evening to enter, the winding roads had us lost much of the time. We walked the edge of the park as the sun set and marvelled at the view out past the cedars to the mountains and valleys in the West. I like to think we could see all the way to the Sea, but I may be making that part up. It was 20 years ago. All this to say that in my mind Lebanon is as tenacious and resilient as a country can possibly be. They’ve been sitting in the middle of the highway of history for eons and it’s toughened them to war beyond what us Canadians can imagine. I hate what’s happening to them, yet again, but I’m also confident they’ll come out the other side.