When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.
-- Tao Te Ching
Wyrd is a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny. The word is ancestral to Modern English weird, which retains its original meaning only from dialectic. -- Wikipedia.org, "Wyrd" article
I know very little about trees outside of what I learned in school. A stump has rings, and you count them to see the tree's age. Inside the tree there are cells. Make sure to note the difference between them an animals! These poor dumb trees!
There's something more to them that I think they missed. I've come to realize it's something fantastic: Ever realize just how weird trees are? Trees branches are weird. Follow one tree branch from the trunk all the way out with your eye. You will see a curve in the branch is made up of lots of smaller forks. When I introduce these figures to my mind, it stops being just another tree.
I can only consider the rings of a tree with those ideas. True, tree branches thicken over time. I learned in school this means they are living calculators. The majestic tree taunts you with its majesty. It's only right to hew it down, and cut the trunk open. It embarrassingly betrays not only its age but its intelligence. I don't know how much this opinion was represented. Maybe it's all the TV I watched. I certainly feel weird sharing this opinion.
But I'm in good company.
It's with that bitterness I come back to the forks: Each branch is a living memory of the situations that formed it. Some of the same thickness cautiously growing next to another, some rarely branching off. But each branch has the same talent to twist and balance all the others. This gives the tree a uniqueness. The tree is not only consistent enough to be a living calculator, it holds its entire adult past above the ground.
- Lewis Tupper
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