Jacarandas

I've been wanting to write about this for a while now.

May and June are the months of the Jacaranda in Southern California.

Wikipedia.

I pass by dozens of them on my way to school everyday.They range in size from 10 feet to 60 feet or more. They can be clustered together or dispersed amongst the streets and houses. They leave underneath them bell-shaped flowers that seem to paint the asphalt purple. Sometimes you'll find a cute jacaranda in front of someone's house; another time you'll be driving down a street and spot a 90 foot giant towering over a church. They don't care where they grow; they just want to grow up and drop purple bells beneath them.

I apologize if the next part is too rambly or sentimental.

The jacarandas turn purple and drop leaves every year. In a way, it's a sad time for me. It reminds me that another year has passed, another year is deducted from my life. I never observed the jacarandas when I was younger. I was unaware of the passing of time outside my own life. For me, time was something that got in the way from me being older and having more things.

I tend to recite the first two lines of T.S. Elliot's "The Wasteland" in my head whenever I'm driving to school, observing these melancholy trees: "April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land...." The jacarandas are the lilacs, in a way. April represents spring, the rejuvenation of life (Easter is in spring for a reason). It reminds me that the world is not so rosy, that death is a very real problem, and that we continue to bring life into this corrupted and sinful world. The jacarandas are cruel in that every year they continue to bloom and drop their purple bells onto the concrete sidewalks. Another year passes, another year my disappointments and failures set me back--constant reminders of the difference between what should be and what could be. But the jacarandas bloom every year; they drift slowly and steadily with the passage of time.

In Japan, there are the cherry blossoms, which hold significant cultural importance for the people of Japan. For me, I have the jacarandas. They are not as significant. They are not part of my culture. But they are nice, and they are pretty, and when they bloom, despite the awfulness of the world, I smile. I like the jacarandas despite the reflections they return. I like them because they will never stop blooming. They are outside me, but live within the same world I do. They inhabit space I inhabit. They thrive with me. If they could observe me back, they'd see a human being one year older every spring. They represent the clock-work of plant life. There's always new life in this world, in this undiscovered universe. When it's winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Where there is radioactive land, there are radiation-resistant fungi.  Life goes on. Plants thrive where and when you least expect them. That's the wonder of life. It replenishes what good there is in the world. If April didn't breed lilacs out of the dead land, then we'd really be in trouble. There would be no way to go on living. But no: the lilacs grow, the jacarandas grow, time passes, we all die, everything begins anew. Cycling forever and ever. It will never stop. Even if we blew up the entire planet, single cell organisms would fly off into outer space on chucks of earth and crash-land on some other planet, and inhabit that other planet, and so the cycle would begin again. The cycle could continue--with or without us. So much depends upon the revival of plants on earth, and yet, so much does not. In reality, it is just us that depend upon it. It is us that are out of the cycle. It is us that will eventually end, not life.