While i a human being have those travelling legs, and they take me to meet the trees on the occassion. My meeting's with any tree always have the potential to become a series of meetings, a communion with wood and leaf.
Trees sanctify space and time. When i see and come into the presence of a tree in any town or city, i immediately feel that something special is being made of this single point where the tree is growing. Especially in heavily built-up areas of human habitation, trees become like humble temples, with the power to cleanse and lighten up the soul deadening concrete, steel and plastic environments. They are also at the same time very vulnerable, but immensely strong in their will to simply be and man today struggles to be his Being, in a society where artificial images are sold to him, conning him down a route following false values: so why doesn't he just sit down under a tree and learn again from these beautiful holy teachers?
I do this, why don't you?
Come with an open heart, trees understand the heart-language.
Trees also invite original ways of thinking and percieving the world. As they grow, watch as the tree begins to manifest its own particular shape, and character. Tree's have this peopleness about them; i believe trees are always studying us, and they find us very interesting. afterall trees have anciently been at the centre of human cultures worldwide, and now today vast numbers of trees in the rainforests, from south America, to Africa, India and Borneo are holding great human focus. Both the focus of those wanting to protect these green wildernesses, and those making money out of the timber and minerals plundered there. On one level this magnetism of human attention towards the trees could be understood in the way trees are vital balancers in the health of the soil, air, and water; and the way trees provide shelter, fruit, fuel and materials for making useful and beautiful objects. Basically man knows full well he would not be here writing blogs on the internet were it not for the gift of life the trees give unconditionally.
On another level human attention is being drawn to the trees out of an ancient relationship making itself heard between man and wood. In days long past it was natural wisdom that the soul of man found its harmonizing alignment while among the trees; man knew himself better in the woods, because here alone the soul could rise and be heard, the trees reflecting like mirrors the images that the soul was needing to tell the man or woman about: Look this is where you are! Trees pass no judgement, they just show you.
Trees were pictured in cosmologies around the world in many great human cultures, as Axis Mundi's or World Tree's, the mighty Spokes on which the wheels of Heaven and Earth turned together. This imaginative vision of the singular world tree holding the plurality of nature's fertile realms in its girth, is also an interesting outwardly turned image of the human body and soul all folded within the other. The Tree is our energy-marrying middle line, the Caduceus of Hermes, the eastern Kundalini; the Earth where the roots of the Tree rumble, are the depths of the soul where crystallization, among master gnomes happens; the Sky where the branches of the Tree spread, are the heights of the soul where dynamic pouring-out of activity happens carried in the vessels of the air-footed sylphs.
Trees also do something very special with sunlight, and this has always caught my attention when meeting them.
The leaves on trees are like human eyes. Human eyes are chief receptors to light, and require light to form an image in the human brain; leaves similarly are mediators of sunlight and while trees don't have brains like us, they form images of the world which are expressed through the way the tree grows and the particular shape of that particular tree's leaf pattern. Geometric dances abound in the tree, harmony thrives where a tree is, or at least is always trying to make itself manifest in the world. Percieving trees like this, you might think of a natural forest as a giant harmonizing beacon in the world. Therefore the continual massacre of forests where minerals and timber are sought as commodities to feed the market, can be regarded as a terrible breakdown of these green harmonizing beacons, letting chaos and disorder bubble up and flow into our world with little in the way to balance it.
Here are some of my observations in poetry of four trees, bringing out the image these particular trees are conveying in their multifaceted ways:
You are so tall and often so light
That your wood is more silver-white
Than ever brown
Branches hold up sacred bronzen bunches
Of keys, by autumn
Swaying spindly heavenwards
When growing close together
And though it could be the wind
Causing your strange vacillations
It seems more to my eye
That the sky is supported
Upon vertiginous
Branchtips
Unequivocal as they bridge
My imagination with the elemental
Knowledge
The Beech
A still
Velvet grey
Corporeal
Coolness
Branches attenuating
Out into scratchy tendrils
Roots fat like snakes
Piling thirstily
Into the loam
When the air travels through
Toothed leaves
Those snakes
I hear hissing
The willow
On a water moulded bank
The willow with her hair
Sleepily everywhere
For the willow with her hair
Tangled in the slow water
Dreams of drowned sisters
For the cracks in the willowbark are creeping
At last she cannot stay and plunges
Her sisters call and the tree is two
As one watches the other dive between river weed
Weaving songs of drowned sisters about river wrapped roots.
On a water moulded bank
The willow with her hair
Hawthorn vibe
Hawthorns around me
Hawthorns surround me
Shock-haired
Woody blazesHot-red with birds berries by winter
Snow-pink in nubile-tender blossom by spring
Hawthorns around me
Hawthorns surround me
Guardians
Growing Ageless
Thrusting across
The threshold
Betwixt things unspoken As plain as tough
As a cottage door
Vibrating with the fortunes
Of anotherworld
Hawthorns around me
Hawthorns surround me
Hasten-not
To come forwards now
To sit
To listen
To the veil-songO’foolish mortal
Hold my hand
I’ll take you there
On the hawthorn vibe
Hawthorns around me
Hawthorns surround me
Robin Collins 2009-2011
