The landscapes I have in mind are not part of the unseen world in a psychic sense, nor are they part of the Unconscious. They belong to the world that lies, visibly, about us. They are unseen merely because they are not perceived.
---Paul Nash, ‘Unseen Landscapes’, Country Life, May 1938
As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.
---Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping
As Plato writes in his long epistle, the Seventh Letter, the highest philosophical understanding cannot be conveyed through written explanation nor learned like other subjects. It comes through direct, inner experience: ‘Through unceasing communion with the matter itself and making it your life’s calling, it is born in the soul suddenly, like light kindled from a leaping spark, and from there it sustains itself.’
---Sam Woodward in an article on Psyche
I photographed these trees at Althorp House on a visit with my cousin. I was thinking, with the beech, about being rooted, about all the lessons from trees about my feelings in Richmond Park:
I sat with two old trees and with them I felt the blurring, or absence, of dichotomies. Roots sinking into the past where the past becomes present as rocks break down and the long-contained minerals move into now and feed the future. Branches reach into a future they can never grasp, but always impact with their actions at an atmospheric level. Roots hold on to here, but take minerals and water from there, from a long distant there. Branches hold on to here, but, again, their impact is felt there. The tree grows up and out and grows down and along.
And I wonder what I should understand from this and the trees tells me: follow love and hold love. Step by step. Focus on here and now. Allow that to be what takes you to then and there. This is The Way.
I thought too about having "the right amount of bark" and about what Crow said in a journey:
Crow said, basically, "Grow a pair!" He told me to be brave enough to buy into the messages I receive through these journeys or tree conversations. He told me that at some point I have to stop grasping after proof and guides and gurus and evidence and instead to fall into the wisdom, let it seep into me and come to my own understanding of it. He told me to think of the old image of a person stuck into the ground headfirst, with legs waving in the air, and how that is a way to think of the tree. "What does this imply to you?" asked the crow. And I thought. I thought of ideas being grounded. I thought of the opposite of flights of fancy - minings of mystery, maybe. I thought about our minds being all connected while the bodies might move around in space.
And I thought about the doors into the Unseen, into the highest philosophical understanding.
Good post.