Coiled in the bowl of a tree

Someone had put the makeshift step (part of one of the felled oaks) back against the Cover Mother Oak. So, I took the opportunity to clamber up and sit in the bowl of her branches.

It was a pleasant day and there were treecreepers cheeping all around and a woodpecker in the distance.

I looked again at all the sick oaks around her, the security detail, keeping the disease at bay. And then I thought, maybe there's something in the heartwood microbiome of older trees, who grew in a healthier world? Maybe that is what is protecting her? The security detail within? Like T cells, but, er, Tree cells.

She has lost a few branches in the past, but all the ones she holds seem secure.

We talked of plant memory and she said something like this: that trees do not remember something for a possible future. They are doing in the now that which the past foreshadowed and the future draws them toward. "The past is here as I react now and the future is here as I react now. It is not memory or foresight but knowing the past and future through what I do now. And it is not an eternal present and time does not stop and time is not meaningless. I am time in my doing."

What she has does in the past has given her a most elegant sweep of the branches and trunk, like a dowager in a ballgown turning fast away.