Straight up Tree
Update on 11-5-2021
The Music of Trees: Improvisation, Iteration, and the Science of Immortality
“Potentially, every tree is immortal.”
In an essay titled “The Things Trees Know,” Bryant writes:
To study how trees grow is to admire not only their persistence, but also their imagination. Live wood just won’t quit. Every time you knock it down, it comes back again, but when a plant sprouts back, it is not a random shot, like some finger simply raised to make a point. Rather, the growing tip of any stem — what botanists call the meristem — answers with an inborn, complex pattern, like a musical tune.
Update on 8-7-2021
I love trees and continue to photograph my calling as much as I do. I’m reading a new book called The Heartbeat of Trees” by Peter Wohllben
All of Peter’s books do not disappoint. “I invite you to join me in the forest, where we will discover that the ancient tie that binds humans and nature exists to this day and is as strong as ever.”
Peter Wohllben
The tree appears to be an elm and very old, located in Mt. Laurel, NJ
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. ~Henry David Thoreau
By Maria Popova
Hermann Hesse believed that if we could learn to listen to the trees, we would achieve profound perspective on our human lives by grasping the deepest meaning of aliveness. He used listening in the metaphorical sense. But the great existential gift of trees — to us in the metaphors they furnish, and to themselves in the materiality of survival — might indeed be a kind of musicality, accounting for their virtuosity at resilience: beyond “the blind optimism” of a tree’s poetic enchantment lies a super sense for listening to the world and responding with inspired ingenuity, encoded with singular wisdom on how to live and how to die.
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