View from an oak

That squirrel is one of the people I saw from the ancient oak in the park across town. I was sitting with the oak in order to try to work out what to write for the tree thing that I am doing.

This tree is a stunner. While I was there I was asking myself, "Is bark the end of the inside or the start of the outside?" Answer: both. It is also where life and death meet.

I also had in mind this which I wrote the night before, from the viewpoint of a tree.

What’s the meaning of life?

You have to understand me to understand how I come to the view I have of life and what it’s all about. This might be hard for you. And it’s hard for me to explain because I don’t do much thinking. I don’t do much looking, either, as it happens, though light is fundamental. Or hearing, though sounds matter. And what I do do isn’t done as I. What I do is done as us. Distributed intelligence, you know? Say you cut off one of my big branches. It’s not a matter of pain, there’s no pain, as such, but it is kind of a pain because it’s something to deal with. The need to stop pathogens getting in. The change in balance and the internal flows of fluids. That is dealt with where it needs to be dealt with and on we go. I know it’s not like this for you. What happens to your branches – an arm, say – has this holistic implication, does it not? Isn’t that what pain is? My view: it’s because you move. Standing still, you just get on with it. You can’t run away or lie down or hide as a one being that has to co-ordinate all this movement. When something happens to me, other parts of me, say the branches higher up or the apex shoot, the tap root, they don’t need to know and they don’t. There’s nothing central overseeing everything. There’s no I. There are a lot of Is and they are all me, but not a one me. This may sound like a contradiction to you, but, trust me: that’s how it is. There’s just Is doing, and all the doings make me, the big me, but not a big I. And though the Is, and effectively me, are engaged in a reaching out and an embracing of otherness(the  friendly fungi and the foes, the air and the water  and the earth’s blessings, by which I mean what you might call minerals), otherness may become me but not necessarily. Am I losing you? Stay with me. I, to use the word to mean this being you see before you, I am in light and light is in I, I am in air and air is in I, I am in among water and water is in I, I am in earth and the parts of earth that can enter are in I. I am in the world and the world is in I. What I do, though, is what the parts that touch the world do. Now then, I can tell you: the meaning of life is to be in the world and to let the world inside.

What is a person?

Would you say a person is a being that is aware and that does? You nod. I do not see but the world is in me and a nod is enough. A person is a cell. That makes me a community. And I do not know what all these persons are aware of or what they do. I am what they have done. They do not know, unless they are told, what anyone else does, but they are told in a way that is unlike the ways with which you are familiar. The root cells can know that a branch has been cut if they can sense the change of my bearing. The leaf cells can know if the root system has been damaged if the flow of water changes. Everything does impact everyone, this is what being one is – but it is not a merging. The persons are all still persons who know and do their own things. Can you understand the distinction I am making between the togetherness of one-being-made-of-many and the togetherness of unity, which is many beings subsumed into one, which is your misinterpretation? All the differences matter and the oneness comes from differences that belong together. Not from samenesses that are one thing. A person is a being whose actions impact everyone in the community. And that means that the big being that I am, that you see before me, is also a person. But a person at a different scale. In that the actions of the being I am as tree as a community that is me, impact the other beings in the community of big beings.

What is the right way to live?

To take in the world you are in until you can no more take in the world and you die and then you become the world other beings take in. At the end, all things come down to earth. For a tree, the purpose of gravity is to feed the earth. All falls, in time. The earth, not the sun, is the closest we have to the divine. Sanctity is reserved for the dependent earth that we depend upon. The sun does not require anything from me; the earth does. And the right way to live is the way that ultimately respects that single truth.

While I was with the tree, I was visited by this attractive bug. Turns out it's one of the ones that favours life on the world that is an oak tree.

And I saw this person who has a fondness for acorns.