This is just a story about a tree. It’s not a parable or an allegory. It’s just a story about a tree.
Across the alley from us in a neighbor’s yard there’s a black walnut tree. It must be well over fifty years old. It was there and fully grown when we moved in more than a quarter century ago. You probably couldn’t have found a scrawnier, scruffier, scragglier walnut tree if you went out looking for them. It had lots of bare branches and many of the leaves it had were yellow and withered. Every year it produced a few walnuts and struggled on.
You see, the black walnut tree was overshadowed by a large oak tree. Very little sunlight made it through the oak tree’s thatch of leaves to make it to the walnut tree. Last year the oak tree died and our neighbors, prudently, had it removed. Suddenly, their yard was flooded with sunlight.
This year the walnut tree has no bare branches, has three times the foliage I’ve ever seen on it, and its leaves are vibrant, thick, and green. The alley has been deluged by a crop of walnuts. The squirrels are going, well, nuts and I suspect that the abundant walnut crop has contributed to the influx of rats we’ve noticed in the alley this year.
I think the message this story is trying to convey is that when disaster strikes, G*d will always provide plenty of rodents to eat.
By the way, what’s an allegory?
An allegory is a story in which each character or event is a symbol of something else. So, for example, it has been suggested that Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an allegory of U. S. politics around 1900.
The Tin Woodman is the industrial workingman. Originally an independent artisan he is now just a cog in a machine. The Scarecrow is the Western farmer, popularly thought to lack the mental ability to understand the modern world. The Lion is William Jennings Bryan. The Emerald City is Washington, DC. The Yellow Brick Road is the gold standard.
Dorothy and her friends follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, i.e. they follow the gold standard to Washington, DC. She can return to Kansas by clicking the heels of her silver slippers (they’re not ruby slippers but silver ones in the book), i.e. return to a sound monetary basis by going to a bimetallic standard which was available all along. And so on.
Pilgrim’s Progress is probably the most famous allegory in the English-speaking world and it was very influential in literature and thought until about sixty or seventy years ago when it fell out of fashion.
I think PD was being facetious. That aside, I collected trees for many years. Our property probably qualifies as an arboretum. Anyway, what you describe has been pretty common for us, minus the rats, although true understory trees will often not so well with full sun. (Squirrels are just rats with fluffy tails. I shoot them and the rabbits on our property.)
Steve
What a lousy diet for the squirrels. Ours eat pears, figs, pecans and tomatoes. But they do have to compete with the birds.
Sorry, Dave, steve has me pegged. I have the sort of disposition that when someone says don’t read this as a parable or allegory, I’ll look for one.
I’m not particularly a fan of allegory. I’ve read C.S. Lewis (both Narnia and the Space trilogy) and his dark twin Philip Pullman and haven’t found allegory very enjoyable in long form. “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” J. R. R. Tolkien
I read the Wizard of Oz with my daughter a few years ago, partly from your recommendation, and found the allegorical elements dispensable and didn’t hamper the enjoyment.
I’ve heard that George Clooney has signed on to play the part of Walnut Tree in the feature film. There may be some changes in Dave’s original story.
Dave, I appreciated your allegory, although I guess it could be interpreted a number of different ways.
As I read it, I saw the Oak tree as a big centralized government, shading the smaller walnut tree, protecting it by it’s branches, but also stifling it’s growth by preventing an infusion of sunlight, or even room for growth.
Parents oftentimes act this way with their children — suffocating them by their love, disallowing any risk to come their way.
But, when given a chance to fend for himself, the Walnut tree was able to be free of the Oak umbrella (government), growing taller and stronger on his own – the very nature of self reliance, giving one the freedom to fail and learn lessons from said failure.
The same is true with children. Release them with love, and they are able to achieve their own destiny.
Who were the flying monkeys? And most important of all, the Wicked Witch?
Following your advice I’ve just released our kids (11 and 14) to run free in the world. My wife and I have wanted to move to London for some time, and now can!
Yay!
Michael,
That would be a wee bit young for my mothering taste. However, by the time children reach 18 they are leaning into their own life, and away from your’s. That’s called healthy individuation.