Blessings of Shade

This is one of my paintings where everything comes together at just the right time, as naturally and pleasantly as a hawk surfing the wind. I didn’t struggle with it. This is probably because the palm tree subject was no longer new. I had treated it several times. Like most of my best work, it was set in motion by a sudden viewing of an actual event, usually a very commonplace event. The one you see here was one of our campus maintenance men doing his work. 

I had already been here long enough to absorb the Biblical association of the palm tree. The Judaic allusions were already part of my way of looking at them. I had seen them in a hurricane, their trunks bent parallel to the street for hours and, when the storm abated, they shook themselves upright. I have stood under them just to see the sky coming through their leaves and bumping against their golden boughs like pieces of deep blue lapis lazuli so prized in ancient Egypt, and heard the whispering music of their dancing leaves, the sound of a distant sea.

It was then I discovered that palm trees are natural air conditioners. They need heat to grow and ripen their fruit, but the golden young dates can burn from the heat, so the tree fans them with its arm-like leaves to cool them down. The heat rising from the ground moves the leaves and, as the leaves move, the warm air is lifted upward, cooling the air underneath. A Bedouin tent works the same way. When you step under a palm tree in the heat of the day, it is like a drink of water, so gratifying. Is the palm tree not God’s own Tabernacle? What is the prayer for shade? I never learned it, so I made an image.