Today I have been back to areas of my youth just looking at all the changes. Surprisingly the thing that appeared most different was the growth of all the trees in these places.

It was remarkable to see how the memories I had were so dependent on trees to give overall shape to their feelings.  Where trees had grown, died, or become injured the overall sense of place had transformed enormously. Its as if the trees had rooted my memories to the shapes they held at the time of the experience. Yet here in front of my eyes were new things.

Another thing that occurred to me was the that trees and humans are so similar. Everywhere i looked I saw summers growths turning into woody stems. Slowly through the natural cycles of seasons months and days these tree beings create their architecture of limbs boughs and trunks and roots.

Its just seemed so obvious that this is what our personalities do over time. We start off young vigourous and flexible with our ideas thoughts and beliefs. Yet during maturation these harden up into dense structures that are more rigid than the first green shoots of childhood. They become rigid and less flexible, stronger but frozen and locked in their shapes.
These same trunks swell and elongate taking us into new directions always searching for life sustaining existance. Sometimes they split fracture or cannot support the weight of the branches they turn into. Other times they are victims of scars, accidents and misfortune. The trees shape bearing witness to the history that it befell. Others cultivated into specimen varieties revert to their wild origins destroying the early attemots to control their appearance into fashionable cultural whims.

Through the landscapes and areas of my youth I saw today trees that I loved struggled under and livid by, having grown onwards beyond the shapes of my memories . I was startled by the aliveness here. Superimposed over the vivid memories was the shock of seeing life itself.

Memories became like dead branches, lifeless records of life that coarsed through their shapes like sap in a stem. I saw silent trees fully alive and conscious slowly unfolding their living responses to fate. The sun lighting up the moss along their dark grey limbs in the cold winter sun. It was a beautiful sight really. A sight that somehow reached a little deeper than normal.

I dont know what to say really, these are just thoughts and impressions that touched me deeply today. Maybe its just sap sinking deeper, hibernating through the shortest days of winter, dreaming tree dreams, hardening in cold winds.

very beautiful and insightful, old bill.
Reading that made my day, thanks.

 

B

[Earthling]

Yes. Very beautiful. Reading it makes me feel a bit warm and nostalgic....

A tree, young or old, if admired, remains a definite vision, and when after long
absence it is visited again, the meeting place is approached with feelings of
pleasure and curiosity as to how one's friend had fared, even with thoughts
as to what changes may come to tree or visitor since first they met; this
may seem like a foolish sentiment - perhaps it is.  But, after all,
sentiment is mingled with most that's best in life.
-   Charles Eley, Gardening for the Twentieth Century, 1923


All life is figured by them as a Tree.  Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of existence,
has its roots deep-down in the kingdoms of Death: its trunk reaches up
heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe:  it is the Tree
of Existence.  At the foot of it, in the Death-Kingdom, sit the three
Fates - the Past, Present and Future; watering its roots from the Sacred
Well.  It's "bough," with their buddings and disleafings, - events,
things suffered, things done, catastrophes, - stretch through all lands
and times.  Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fiber there an act
or word?  Its boughs are the Histories of Nations.  The rustle of it is
the noise of Human Existence, onwards from of old.  ....  I find no
similitude so true as this of a Tree. 
Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great.
-  Thomas Carlyle