Oct 4, 2024

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.