Day 14: The Cathedral of Trees

The Cathedral at Highbury Fields

Pho for lunch

The sun came out today and made the possibility of an adventure more enticing. This however was a study day, there wouldn’t be time for an adventure. I gathered up my books and my camera and headed for the tube. Halfway to the station, with the lumbering weight of my camera in my pack, I wondered why I had even brought it. 

She finally gets a hat

The only plan I had was to finish all the reading I had assigned. I headed out to Shepherd’s Bush to find a place to study. I hadn’t been out there yet and although I was told it was quite a bit of a trek to get to from where I was, there was a big mall there with everything in it. 

Why not, I thought, let’s go check it out. The Westfield Mall off the Central Line in Shepherd’s Bush, is just like any other mall, Westfield or otherwise. It is well stocked with every luxury store, every bath and fragrance store, every food court store and a staple of rebellious teenagers with empty backpacks and too much makeup on, smoking outside the front doors, to complete the total mall picture.

If you hadn’t told me I just took two tube lines and passed stops called “Oxford Circus” and “Queensway” to get here, I would have thought I was at the Beverly Center across the street from my apartment in LA. There’s something to be said about the familiarity of a modern mall. It's International Genericism and Global Mass Marketing at its finest.

I decided on pho for lunch, which was surprisingly good and warmed me immediately. I took out my books and did some reading for a few of hours. It was Friday afternoon and the mall was starting to get loud and crowded. The movie theater upstairs was starting to form a line. I better start heading back soon, I thought. As I was still in need of a hat and other warm accessories, I thought I’d do a little shopping on my way out. I went to the familiar H&M and bought a hat and mittens and a scarf all for £1 each!! Wow, what a deal considering I’d likely never be wearing these when I returned to LA. Pleased with my find, I headed back.

After a while people are the same everywhere you go. I mean at first, when you land on foreign soil, everything is so novel and fresh. You notice all the differences compared to home and that’s what makes it exciting. But after a while, if you stay long enough, you start to notice all the similarities as well. Teenagers still smoked outside of malls after class, the working stiff still met his mate at the pub for happy hour, mother’s still worried about getting their kids back from school on time, Friday night dates still meant dinner and a movie, and H&M recruited the same demographic of consumer as it did at home, the gang of girlfriends shopping together while talking on their cell phones to the other gang of girlfriends who hadn’t made it to the mall yet. Everything’s the same after a while . . .

Now I would have kept on that line of thinking had I not gotten off the tube at the Highbury and Islington Station exactly as the sun was setting over Highbury Fields. At that moment I witnessed a sunset unlike any I had ever seen before. The moment I set foot on the grass the rest of the city fell away. There was only me, the coming night, and the silence. It was for these last few moments of the day that I was grateful I lumbered my camera in my pack.The last pink shades of the day, climbed into the blue sky and leaked away into the orange light. The radiant orb of the sun boldly diverted all attention to itself, hanging against the line of London planes like a misplaced orange marigold on their branches, the trees stayed silent, reverently allowing the sun its final curtain call.

Lined alongside the central walkway, they worked instead to build a holy place, a sacred scaffolding of light and lines that would house all who came to worship there. Their stately trunks formed the columns of their growing cathedral, their tracery branches created their buttresses. They rose and curved to high arches, building their roof. Like school yard girls playing London Bridge, they leaned across the pathway, interlacing their hands in a common effort. Leaving nothing undone, the cambers of their blackening branches traced leadlight lines. The setting sun, obliging their stained-glass intentions, offered them glass in hues of pink and blue and orange to fill in their spaces. The cathedral of the trees was now complete. But it didn’t last long. In the fading light of half-dusk, their candles lost their glow. Their engineered masterpiece faded into a cold, black night, their necessary transience beseeching worshipers return another day.

I was wrong that everything was the same after a while. Nothing was like this field today, quiet in its moment of final prayer. Nothing would ever be like it again. Never again would the setting sun build a cathedral in Highbury Fields the way it built it today. The congregation of worshipers would change, or not come at all. 

The illuminated “windows” would pick new colors and the swaying branches would not remember their original design. But here, today, in the evanescent exit of the setting sun, I was the witness. A worshiper in this field of fading light that saw a temple rise and fall, its temporary edifices the evaporation of a moment, its sacred offering the gift of all time.