In the course of a question game with a friend with an imaginative mind, the challenge was posed to me: describe a tree. Simple enough I suppose. Unless you want anyone reading to be able to climb through the branches in their imagination, and know the tree like they're there. This small story was getting dusty just sitting on my computer so I'm blogging it... it's really just a rant, an outpouring of imagination and creation.
To smell, hear, see and touch a tree is like experiencing creation. It is unexplainable. The sap that is unwashable, staining your favorite jeans, and sticking in your hair. The small branches you didn't see that hit your face, and make your eyes water uncontrollably. Or, the unsteady branch that gives way when a child is too reckless. The spiders and ants that flow out of crevices in the tree, using its resources to continue their busy preoccupied lives. The smell of pine cones, and pine needles that seems to linger beyond the forest. Or the simplicity of the mechanics of helicopter seeds, dancing to the ground to begin new life... a glimpse of new creation, those seeds, sheltered in their vessel, disrupted by the chubby fingers of a child and their mother, exploring the fall ground.
Peeling the white bark of a birch, not realizing as a child that skinning the slender tree was killing it. How can curiosity be disruptive? I suppose the trees just smirk through their pain that children can be so unknowing. The callouses on barefeet that fade only in winter, from grasping at the thick bark and low branches, to hoist oneself up from a sad existence attached only to the ground. A restorative pain when your hands are bleeding from swinging from the branches. Fueling our essays and our newspapers by providing the last of their usefulness to an uncurious city. But, in the woods, no one dares look down. Only, the utmost respect and adventure to look up, and feel that childhood inspiration.
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