Living and dying

As I’ve focused my attention on close-in looks at specific moments in various trees’ lives, I find myself drawn to wounds – holes etched in the trunk or the places where limbs were lost. Sometimes a limb is removed by natural or human agents; sometimes birds or mice or raccoons gnaw holes in roots and trunks. In the face of these assaults, the tree, slowly and tenaciously, works to heal the wound, whatever the cause. 

That’s what has happened and that’s what my intellect attends to. But it’s not what my artist-eye sees. Rather my focus is on the interplay of colors, textures, and shapes that grow out of the tree’s natural process of healing or decline. Such a richness of life in the process of living and dying. 

I notice that, as in human life, beauty often transcends age and decline. And I appreciate it in trees as in people!