Unshy crowns

I finally made it to visit my Sentinel Trees on the other side of the Reserve.

Two of them are an oak and an ash whose crowns collide.

On the front photo, what I was trying to show is that crown shyness, that there is a space between the canopies of individual trees, is not always the case. And while trees will grow away from shade, or toward lighter areas, and thus avoid other trees, they'll happily grow over them, or battle it out with peers as they grow. Hence the straight stems with the first branches very high up in forest trees.

In this case, the oak was younger than the ash and at a certain point started to veer sharply away, while the ash grew a long horizontal branch that goes through the upper part of the oak's canopy. The oak has strengthened to support that vast ash branch.

I noticed for the first time the eye shape in the oak.

I sat to listen.

This oak calls himself Chronos, which, he says, is not to diss Kairos, but because he feels that his form is about the impact of clock time. He is showing how the path of time changes you and how moments of time are made into matter. He says that you have to live in time and also accept that time passes. Both are true.

About crown shyness he said, "Your ideas and rules and theories. They all blur things into generalities that lose truth. The situation is the truth. This here, the crowded canopy, is not an exception to a rule: it is the rule right here and now!"

He says, apropos of Kairos yesterday, that we all consume light, whether directly or in plants and flesh. The task of the Earth beings is to make matter and life out of light.

He gave me this image: an acorn falls, but "The Fall" for the acorn is not something to regret or rail against but the possibility of life! He says we fall from abstract/potential/above/sky/light/theoretical to concrete/real/below/earth/matter/life. Then the tree grows up, seeking again the light, and drawing it in to make more matter and more life, but the tree never leaves the rootedness, the earthiness, the material. He takes light (idea, theory, energy, consciousness??) in from above and brings it back down here where it can engage in generating more life and more matter. And he says the destiny of all, and the ultimate reward, is to fall back to earth and give back all that matter and life to the very earth. You can't hold it for ever! You willingly let it go!

The first fall to earth, the alpha, is birth. The second fall to earth, the omega, is death. It starts and ends with matter. And in between, yes, we reach for the light and absorb the light, but we don't loosen our grip on the life-earth-matter.

And this, I think, is how our thinking needs to be: reaching out to the theory, but that theory is rooted in and comes back to the matter, the earth.

As I left, Chronos said, "Watch." This seemed related to the eye... but also, yes, a watch is a chronometer! And by "watch" he was making a distinction between passive seeing and detached observing. To watch has the idea of to mind ("watch the kids for me"). It's about being careful because you are a vulnerable and dependent being among other vulnerable and dependent beings.