If the Get Back documentary from late 2021 achieved anything it was to finally dispel the pernicious lie that Yoko Ono broke up The Beatles. There were so many factors behind the split (greed, laziness, the death of Brian Epstein, drugs, ego, the arrival of Allen Klein, fame proving to be more curse than blessing – take your pick), but Yoko was not one of them.
She has also quietly and patiently waited for people to catch up to her enormously important role as a pioneer in avant-garde music and not just the custodian of the John Lennon legacy (related: her prowess in business has also been overlooked for too long).
Now she has turned 90 and to mark this birthday, her son, Sean Ono Lennon, created a virtual Wish Tree for her with its own website.
It is based on the real-world Wish Tree idea that was started in 1996 by Yoko as an ongoing art installation where trees were planted in a variety of locations around the world and people were invited to write down a wish and tie it to the tree (which is native to each specific location).
Yoko provided instructions back in 1996 for what people were to do: “Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friends to do the same. Keep wishing. Until the branches are covered with wishes.”
(People are told to not tie their wishes to trees during winter as they are at their most vulnerable then.)
With the digital incarnation, you can add your own wish or zoom in and read the wishes of others, spinning the digital tree around as birds chirrup and occasionally rain falls down.
They are also encouraged to donate to One Tree Planted (a one-off payment or a monthly payment) so that real trees will be planted in her honour.
There is a throwback to the late 1960s when she and John came up with the “peace acorn” project which grew to the point where they posted acorns to world leaders with a note reading, “Enclosed in this package we are sending you two living sculptures—which are acorns—in the hope that you will plant them in your garden and grow two oak trees for world peace. Yours with love, John and Yoko Ono Lennon.” (There’s a reference to this in The Beatles’ ‘The Ballad Of John & Yoko’ single.)
Yoko’s Twitter feed remains full of gnomic pronouncements that oscillate between the profound and the ludicrous (e.g. “Dance in your dreams”; “I very rarely dream. I am always wide awake even when I am asleep”; “All things are interconnected. So be careful”) and the Wish Tree is very much in keeping with that spirit.
