Trees

Today I sat out on my deck. It's a hot day with an achingly blue sky and a mild, inconstant breeze. Normally I would read or write out there, but today I just looked at the trees.

I tried to clear my mind of thought. I found that one way to do this was to take whatever thought I might be having and visualize it as words suspended in space before me. Focus on these hovering words, then try to continue the thought. Guess what? It's nearly impossible. By projecting the thought outside your head and into the external world, you objectify it and drain it of power. Suddenly it's just a row of letters, like children's blocks or Scrabble tiles. And you look past it ... at the trees.

Have you noticed how very green the trees are in midsummer? And how when the wind stirs the branches, groups of trees sway together in a long undulating rhythm like a cluster of sea anemones? How the tops of the trees, massing together, resemble a distant green hill, and when the breeze freshens, the hill shivers and shimmers like a mirage? 

There is fantastic complexity to the interactions of the hundreds of branches and thousands of leaves. The trees, closely spaced, moving in unison, seem almost like a single large creature, like the giant Argos of Greek mythology, with his thousand sparkling eyes. Green eyes, maybe.

Once upon a time, people knew every tree and its leaves and its fruit, and the birds it nested, and the water that fed it. Now trees are mainly just background objects. We ignore them. Perhaps we shouldn't.

Comments

[Matthew Cromer]

I like trees, and I try not to ignore them. ;-)

[FloridaSuzie]

Matthew,
Excellent photos!

MP,
This is one of your best essays IMO. I'm a nature freak and pretty much soak it up on a daily basis. The same stand of trees can look totally different in the varying degrees of light and darkness of a single day and certainly vary with the seasons even here in Florida. Even one tree standing alone is a work of art always in progress.