Treelike

These awkward, lanky festering things – burned and cut and killed. Some are left alone in remote mountain spaces and others are found skirting all manner of planetary skin. No two of them are the same, no three of them alike. No forest can contain them in the deepest sense there is. Always extending beyond themselves and finding me where I am.

I trace a finger down the bark and notice the textures gently rocking my touch back and forth as it journeys down – a gravitational meditation and a subtly different path each time. These trunks are like fingerprints.

If I open my eyes and ears and heart I notice the branches. I notice their applause and their weeping, their joy and sorrow, their living and dying. I can feel them embrace tiny, climbing bodies and I can taste their sweat as they balance Newton’s centrifugals.

Beneath my feet I can sense a massive iceberg beneath the ocean – a circulatory system of roots, often connected to other systems. This is a community of interwoven life and connection that cries out to be seen, understood and recreated above the surface.

They are so fragile, so easily broken and repurposed.

They survive by water, connection and sunlight.

They evolve through the seasons into different expressions of beauty.

They resource the lesser-resourced and are abused by the greater-resourced.

They are a symbol of hope – a prophetic image of what is possible.

They are a rough draft.

A scribbled, colorful illustration.

We are just like them.