There is an oak along a closed ride at the Reserve which I had previously admired. As I was close by, to record the status of my Sentinel Trees, I went and sat with this tree.
As I was sitting there, listening to the birds and quietening my mind, I saw some squirrels, scared up into the branches by my arrival, come back to the ground to resume foraging. I watched them.
And a thought I cannot articulate - not at the time and not now - came to me. These ideas about connection and oneness... I have often been off-put in the past by the way in which one-ness can suggest that one's consciousness is a container, as it were, for the all. Or that the self expands out into all that is. In either case there is this vast expansion of the significance of the human claiming to experience one-ness. In the case of connection, it can seem as though the human is the hub will all else connected like spokes on a wheel. No, no! I want to scream. That's not IT!!!
As I was watching the squirrel, I wondered how the squirrel experiences her connections. Her one-ness. I doubt she does. She just lives it. There is, I imagine, no ego encompassing all or expanded to embrace the all. There is just her processes of living within the network of the processes of being of all else that is.
What I mean is that you can't experience one-ness. It happens through your living and your being and your doing.
Our separation of experiencing and living does, I think, separate us from the actuality of one-ness. It's experienced (I know - there is a need for a word that means experiencing without thought, just as feeling or being) when we lose ourselves and as soon as one thinks, Ah! This is one-ness! The spell is broken.
Maybe that, for me, is what "the emergent third" implies... it is the state of self that is no-self. The state when self and other cease to be self and other but are just two processes among an infinitude of processes.
Later, I saw this other magnificent oak. Underneath, it reminded me of the Sacred Grove Oak - the branches reaching down to the ground and the cavernous space within the canopy.
From the outside, you see why the tree does this: it maximises the surface area of leaves on the south-facing side of the tree. And it prevents competition!
Once again, I saw that strange mark on the trunk, which I have previously pondered over.

There were ground growing gill mushrooms, which may be mychorrhizal, but there was also a pretty line of deadwood fungal fruits.

You've got the big and the small - the oaks and their wonderful canopies, and then the little fungi. Yes, I think it would be a good move, in many ways, for us humans not see ourselves at the "hub".