An Old Wall

An Old Wall

There was a long, high, old wall along Jl. Petojo Enclek XIV as though the remains of a wall of an old fortress. It was beautifully grown, decorated with creeping plants. They framed the old wide former windows and gates, without to plant and water them. Walking there was like wandering in a village, though you were in the center of Jakarta. But that was a long time ago.

Another curiosity was a tree that embraced the wall with its roots as exotic as a relief in an old Eastern temple. Alas! People cut him down. Only its roots were saved, free from destruction, offence and affront, but that was still enough and valuable who as Job was hit by 1001 adversities to keep himself alive.

Days before our National Day, August 17, there was the usual cleaning activity. This wall also was cleaned from all the “dirt” that was on the wall but it wasn’t a clean wall that appeared, but an ugly half ruined wall, for it were the wild plants that covered the wall with beautiful greenery and flowers as lovely hair covers, hides an ugly scar on a face.

Poor wild plants. The sun shines upon you, the rain bless you, artists would paint you in beautiful lines and colors, poets would sing of you, the wind gently rocks you to and fro and butterflies, bees, damselflies, … gratefully kiss you.

It’s the Creator who painted it and that tree on that wall. He adorns, decorates our ditches, paths, slopes, rivers, mountains, lakes, even ruins with weeds, wild plants, wild trees.

It’s our eyes, our prejudice that considers as beautiful only what is costly, what is on exhibitions and what is exhibited - so grand and freely given - by Nature, as worthless, weed, dirt. 

There’s a stately, noble waringin tree of over a century - 10 men couldn’t embrace him -, lucky standing in Istiqlal Mosque, safe, protected from being cut down.

October 1987

From Media Indonesia August 23, 1991

March 2011