griot – noun; a member of a class of traveling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa
I noticed a blue tree and it immediately caught my eye. It stood still like an abstract, blue moment in time. Everyone in the park noticed this tree. I wasn’t the only one. So strange and striking…it was something divine as if it had been planted from above. The children played in circles around its stump. The birds flew down in arcs from leaf to leaf. And me–well, I could only observe the strange beauty rooted in the ground before me.
Instead of sitting under it, I sat across from it so that I could look at it, watch it, sympathize for it? But no matter how hard I tried or stared, I couldn’t uncover what this tree must have been feeling. At my first gaze between the tree’s crooked, blue arms, I saw what appeared to be a land all too familiar to me; a peek through a window hinting to a green field lush with all of the feelings I’ve been searching for but the ones I’m too mute to speak, too afraid to write, and too shy to sing.
Before I saw this tree and the field beyond it, I asked myself everyday, “Can I cry now?” But,
the. tears. would. not. come.
My soul felt dry and in desperate need of a heavy rain. Because we all know what happens after the rain. The sun comes out again.
but. i. could. not. cry.
Each morning was gray as if it was going to rain and each night ended dry, adding just another day to the drought. I imagine this is how Africa must feel. I know it senses the tears building up. I know it prays for rain. But does it ever have a chance to cry? Has it ever seen the sun come out after the rain?
Like the tree. Everyone wants to play around it, fly on top of it, or sit across from it but meanwhile no one else is blue like it. All we can do is imagine, tell others about the lonely, blue tree in the park, write a story about it, sing a song for it…
I imagine this is how Africa must feel. I wish I were born a Griot. I wish my mother passed on to me from her mother and her mother’s mother, the gift and privilege to sing stories of blue trees, of all the things in this world that I know and don’t know; the things that make our tears flow. Then I wouldn’t have to ask my dry, blue soul, “Can I cry now?”
“Blue, here is a shell for you. Inside you’ll hear a sigh, a foggy lullaby; there is your song from me.”
–joni mitchell
writer's rehab. 
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