I met this tree just after I destroyed my last car in a ford and was feeling pretty shit. It was summer and the tree was incredible. i had a good conversation with her and wrote about it in my paper on trees. I decided I needed to go back. It was tricky as I couldn't quite recall where she was... and first up thought this was she.
I took a picture as the wound had healed in a way that was strikingly dissimilar to other trees. Instead of the bark gradually closing, leaving lips around the split, there is this layer of totally different bark. It almost looked like a slimmer tree had been embraced by the large tree.
This is not an English but a Turkey Oak. Maybe they heal differently.
Further down, I found the tree I had met before and was stunned by her size. I had forgotten how big she is, and no signs of the trunk hollowing at all. Or many lost branches. She is utterly, stunningly vibrant.
I sat against the trunk. It was cold. But I didn't feel cold. The bark felt warm and the tree, with a small holly in front of me, protected me from a brisk and frigid breeze. I had a waking dream, which I recount when I remembered it... it was strange as the waking dream was intense, but once I started relating the conversation, I had forgotten it, and my memory of the conversation was also somewhat hazy. It was about what I should do. And first the tree said she could not tell me. The trees always say that. They say they can only say what a tree does, not what anything else should do. In explaining what a tree does, she was talking about this idea of give and take in a community and she said, very firmly, that the giving is not about generosity or reciprocity. She told me to consider it the other way around. She said that one cannot resent what is taken, though one might try to prevent things being taken. One also takes, and others do not resent this, though they may try to prevent it. She said we confuse matters by having all these complicated feelings and obligations and angers and ideas like rights and justice and fairness. She said that love is not a feeling; it is living in a world that is entangled. She said that the only thing that she could refer to as what a human might understand as "good" was an assemblage of complexity, diversity, entanglement, and creativity. Life (and thereby love) flourishes in rambuctious profusion and variety. She also told me that I am happier with trees than with humans and that I needed to work out what my roots were for and use them as such.
What I then recalled at the time is recorded here.
At the end... a queen bee visiting various under-leaf places. I wonder if she was looking for a place to lay eggs or feeding grubs?
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