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I’ve been snapping tree trunks.  It started over a week ago and now I just can’t seem to stop.  At the beginning it was an exercise in curiosity but after a while I began to feel a little voyeuristic tracing these wrinkles and pimples and wounds that speak of an endlessly patient existence.  What a frivolous human I am! Not that is has stopped me posting them for everyone else to see.  It’s as if the act of recording has created a greater intimacy between myself and the trees.   I’ve taken thousands of tree trunk snaps , here are just a few.   Some definitely are not native (not that I’d ever exclude a human on that basis!) and I don’t know what all of them are – but they are all beautiful. 

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the next best time is now.  - Chinese Proverb

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do - Willa Cather (1873 -1947)

       Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience.  Knowing grass, I understand the meaning of persistence.  – Hal Borland

Trees are poems that earth writes on the sky

We fell them down and turn them into paper

That we may record our emptiness

Kahlil Gibran

Because they are primeval, because they outlive us, because they are fixed, trees seem to

emanate a sense of permanence. And though rooted in earth, they seem to touch the sky.

For these reasons it is natural to feel we might learn wisdom from them, to haunt about

them with the idea that if we could only read their silent riddle rightly we should learn

some secret vital to our own lives; or even, more specifically, some secret vital to

our real, our lasting and spiritual existence.

- Kim Taplin, Tongues in Trees

Ok, tree-hugging moment over.  Do you have any tree words you’d like to share?  I’d love to hear them.  Stick them in the comment box below.