Story

I focus here on the dark center, the place where a branch was somehow long ago removed. I imagine I can see saw marks but perhaps the limb was felled by some other means, perhaps it was injured or broken by a strong wind. I can see – or imagine I see – the new growth that slowly impinges and attempts to heal over the scar.

 I don’t know exactly what is happening here, where things stand in the process of healing. That’s really the pressing question. But I’m somewhere to the side of that, not an uncommon place for me. I’m attracted to the difference in textures and colors, the way in which the dark and wizened stump of a limb is surrounded by subtle, quiet growth of bark and tree flesh.

 That’s the story for me: two of the many distinct and different ways that life manifests itself: sometimes rough and cut off, sometimes fluid and effortless, all part of an on-going mystery. It’s a chapter, maybe just a paragraph, in a story older and more complex than we are. I’m grateful to see part of it.