Midsummer Dream House

 

When sunlight meets a tree

Every evening, a ray of sunlight descends to a forgotten garden and leans on a tree. This tree is young and thin compared to its peers standing a bit further away, still wearing their heavy coats of dark leaves at the end of summer. All those leaves, much larger than my hands, sing an old hymn that is instantly picked up by wind and carried away to places much different from a green idyll.
When sunlight meets a tree, it falls on a trunk that has not witnessed a whole century yet, but it has heard the wind speak almost every day for the last few decades. A ray of sunlight never brings a song to sing, a ballad to recite, a melody to whisper – and so the leaves of every tree, pale and dark, green, brown and yellow, remain indifferent to its presence, as much as they do not care about their own shadow. They barely notice this grey phantom stretched on the ground beneath them, sometimes imitating the shape of two specific branches, just like a ghost may imitate the voice once attributed to the name on the ghost’s gravestone. Sunlight experiments with this shape, as the wind forms the language of trees. The grey spot on the ground may be as transparent as a fallen cloud, or marked by edges as sharp as if they were drawn by an architect’s pencil. A quiet companion as familiar as the restless air.
Our own thoughts envy the variety and beauty of the evening’s colour and the fleeting contrasts sunlight paints in the garden. We interpret them as a synthesis of change and eternity, two strange concepts we admire for providing a clear dichotomy, ready to be projected on all particularities of life, such as a broken watch, a dying flower or an abandoned garden. Becoming accessible and yet mysterious when reflected by art.
Sunlight only ever leaves the tree to rest at night. It is there to make its drawings in the earliest morning hours, but for some reason we choose to believe the evening to be the time of a long-awaited meeting, most probably because of a random impression we once stumbled upon at that hour and then put on a pedestal. Yet beauty is not the only paradigm capable of guiding our perceptions. There may be another reason why we are so drawn to that visible collision of time and time, growth and passing, roots once laid in the earth by a gardener and a ghostly substance without any clear shape. As we watch the sunlight lay on a tree’s shoulder, we cannot see beyond our sad, boring, conventional, static dreams, yet we sense the imperfections of our own mind and the art it produces. Thus, we cling to a question, the need for a final decision. What is this place to our thoughts – a garden or a graveyard?

 

Creative Nonfiction by Milena Filipps
First published by Livina Press (2023), Issue 6, p. 87.

 

 

Milena Filipps is a history student in Germany. She enjoys reading works by Marcel Proust, Jane Austen and Goethe as well as learning about art history and historical architecture. Her essays Academic Reading and My Glasses (2023) were published by Livina Press, while her poems appeared in Swim Press (2023), The Field Guide Poetry Magazine(2023), RIC Journal (2021) and Mosaik (2020), among others. You can find her on Instagram @milenafilipps