As all roads lead to the Center. I might begin anywhere, but spring has brought blossoming days and crisp, luscious nights that remind me of the evening when I made my bed on a balcony overlooking the garden of a towering Victorian house in Toronto’s Rosedale. Almost asleep, my mind received my first vision full-blown, delighting, mystifying, and thrilling me awake. I left my cocoon of blankets to find pencil and paper to preserve the image, noting the peach/orange/golden sky, the intense blue-green of the vast foam-crested wave, the vein-like roots of the tall fir tree suspended miraculously in space. Satisfied that I would not lose the picture, I returned to my cocoon, wondering, to stare at the stars until I fell asleep.
The next day I made a sketch in oil paints of what I had “seen” the night before and was surprised to find how difficult it was to fit the enormity of the image onto a tiny page. But it was close enough to serve as a more accurate reminder, and by then I was becoming curious about the symbolism of the surreal composition and about the process. Could this sort of “happening” be encouraged to repeat itself? The next night I arranged myself on my balcony bed and again, on the verge of sleep, received a picture. It was somber and with a symbolism somewhat more available to my understanding.
The image was composed of two roads intersecting in space, one broken at a turning point, the other bearing a deciduous tree. A moon marked with blood hung above the roads. A scarlet fish skeleton floating below them. The composition disappointed me, perhaps because it was less mysterious. I knew the roads symbolized “the road to destruction” and “the road to Heaven.” The significance of the moon and of the fish skeleton eluded me. I dutifully recorded the image but decided not to force such an event again.
What most amazes me today is how long I lived with that image without discerning its extremely simple meaning. It remained obscure to me for almost two decades. During all of those years, I wrote poetry full of symbolism that revealed its origins and meaning to me readily. Yet, the tree and wave were as mysterious to me as to other people who saw my painting of the image in our home. One day in the early ’80s, words to accompany it sprang to mind: “The Tree of the Water of Life.” At last, my left, rational brain had a thread to my right, imagistic brain. The Tree was a figure of Christ. The Wave was the overwhelming problems that assail one in life—or life itself—but also the complete permeation of that water by the blood of Jesus that flowed from His Cross into the world and into all of its subsequent history.
The longer I lived with its revealed meaning, the more I drew strength from the image and fathomed nuances of meaning from the details. The Tree, uprooted but ever-green, symbolizes Jesus’s death (the Cross is sometimes referred to as a tree) and resurrection (it hovers between Earth and Sky) and continuing life as the Holy Spirit (its surreal relationship to the Earth). Its vein-like roots clasp “all of the earth” with it in the root ball, as Jesus has a claim upon the whole world to redeem its people. The water appears luscious and lucid but it is also enormously heavy and impenetrably deep—as life is all that we love and need that remains profoundly mysterious. Supernaturally, the tree prevents the wave from falling—or lasts beyond and untouched by the “baptism” of the wave’s falling. Jesus protects us from life only by permeating it and surviving the worst it can do to us. With him, we are “in but not of” this world. The wave has erupted from an otherwise calm ocean, an indication of its mysterious force, but perhaps also of its deceptive, untrustworthy nature. Insurmountable and crushing problems are an aspect of life. There is nowhere to find shelter from the wave that must soon fall except with the Tree or in the ether, which also is the dominion of the Tree. I suppose the water of life must also contain death, though I never had acknowledged that limitless element of the sea in this Wave until I came to write about it. Demonstrating its transcendence over the wave in its focal point of gold, the sky depicts glorious dawn or sunset or both. It could represent pre-history or the Apocalypse. It is the present tapestry and backdrop of Christ’s Glory. Later, I realized that I tend to identify fir trees with males who survive and often flourish in Canadian wilderness settings, those endless tracts of forest that overwhelm my imagination.
Fifteen years after I made the painting, during a harrowing year of exile and betrayal, The Tree of the Water of Life came with us and hung in our bedroom. Morning and evening it drew me into its message of hope. The ruination of our particular hopes seemed to belie our obedience to the guiding Spirit in “leaving everything” to pursue with all our hearts and minds a dream that failed to mature. Later, I could see how that agonizing wave accomplished many things that were hidden to me for a while. For example, our oldest son met the woman who would become his wife. The challenges we met also prepared us for the much more devastating tsunami that was gathering force for our return home. My most persistent memory of that year is not of the betrayal of friends or of our gasping, flailing, and treading water but of a few faithful souls deeply rooted in their own godliness who helped us to find our way back home: Jan and Ed, Charis, John and Susan, Mary Jane G., Susan, and Fendi.