I am totally beguiled by the thought that trees can form silent but central characters in our lives.
I was inspired to write a short piece for this blog exploring this concept just a little, leaving me itching to work up more output around it.
The piece itself is about reflecting upon one’s younger years. From teenaged infatuation; through the main milestones of adulthood to that point where not a lot new is going on for the mid-section and therefore idle thoughts start wrangling with existentialism and all the dashed romantic notions of shoulda, woulda, coulda.
The central witness to my human’s unspoken melodrama here is his neighbourhood tree.
You know, the one you notice has started to push the sidewalk up all uneven. When did that happen you ponder on a bad hair day after the kind of trip that could have easily been avoided had you been wearing glasses, and therefore irritates you enough to want to chop it down there and then; as if its bark hasn’t already been pissed up against by a million dogs before you got there.
On some of your better days, the shafts of light cast through fertile thick coats of leaves, bathed the scene, smell and vitality of the summers of your teen spirit. The bones of bark are picked at in winter when eyes can no longer meet, as leaves start to fall and the last of the birds are gone. It stands alone until its hopes of late spring begin with the first sneeze of hay-fever to be credited to its awakening. This tree knows about the seasons of life.
The tree that was here long before you and will still be here long after you go wants to scoff at your ego and tell you that there’s not a lot he/she/it hasn’t seen. What you are going through is nothing new.
It wants to tell you; you’re only human thinking and doing typical human shit. Your life is finite. You don’t have forever. None of it REALLY matters in the grand scheme of the universe. You might not like it; but the resistance of time passing is futile. It is the will of Mother Earth and you are just one of one kind of animal she keeps.
Maybe you don’t care what a tree might think. Or maybe you’ve never considered it. I hope maybe you might now.
Look: the trees exist; the houses
we dwell in stand there stalwartly.
Only we
pass by it all, like a rush of air.
And everything conspires to keep quiet
about us,
half out of shame perhaps, half out of
some secret hope.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If you would like to read the piece I refer to above that inspired this post please click HERE. Thank you for reading!
A Savage Joy 
I loved this blog post thank you, great subject. I feel a loss when an old tree i see (and know) gets chopped down. My elderly father has chopped a large beech tree down in his garden this year. That tree bore witness to my childhood from birth until 19 and still stood strong until i reached 50! I was so fascinated with trees when i learned that trees communicate with each other underground and support and warn each other of drought etc in a forrest. This used to be a crank theory but according to the New Scientist has a basis in scientific fact now. So trees live a long life in a different time span and are a community! I also think it stems from seeing a tree leaf cell under a microscope as a kid and realising it was a living cell! I thought when i was very young that a tree being so inanimate and immovable was in some way not a living organism if that makes sense! This realisation made me more respectful of nature !!
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I know a tree just like yours, it was a copper beech tree in the neighbouring property of the cottage we used to stay in every summer for our holidays. I just couldn’t imagine it not being there. So sad but now many owners later it is almost as if it never was all those hundreds of years and dwellers who caught the copper glow first thing in the morning and during the long summer days….thanks for triggering the memory! I did not know that trees communicate, must read up more, sounds fascinating!! Have a great Sunday 😎
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https://mindfulnessfutures.wordpress.com is my site, my gravitar points to an old site!
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I am IN LOVE with my Live Oak tree in the front garden. When I was young, I asked my mum why the Glasgow parks had so few oak trees in them and she explained that it took many years for them to grow to full height. One of the many delights in moving back to America, the place of my birth, has been that trees grow really fast in the subtropics. The live oak looks most like the traditional British one but we have slender water oaks in the reserve behind the house. You might be interested to know that my husband has spotted over 30 species of dragonfly at the containment pond at the end of our street. Sometimes I feel like I am surrounded by fairies when they mob us at the pond, looking for mosquitoes.
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Sounds completely gorgeous and serene, loving that my kin insects are in your pond – they are magical wee beasties for sure! How wonderful your climate means you have turbo growth trees! It is currently freezing here in Scotland! Lovely to meet you 😄
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It is lovely to meet you too! It feels cool here but the TV tells me it is 78F /26 C degrees outside…my blood is thin from my Mexican heritage. 🇲🇽
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