Blown over

 This picture is from the storm before last.  A part of the trunk of this tree is now a bench in the cemetery I sat on it today.  Me and Alice used to call this spit tree because once I sniffed and spat near it.  For years we both ritually spat on it when we walked past it.  I would say lets turn up here and go past spit tree.  When you are a kid trees become landmarks in a very personal way, I had a pair tree down my lane and larger trees would become things like "the tree with the rope swing" or the tree where we found the dead squirrel with the face." or the tree where I took my shoes off to go for a poo."  Trees became individuated and folded into a personalized landscape of events, the singular event of growing up. 

When my dad left school he was a feller of trees using only an axe for 6 months. The skill he learnt then never left his body.  I watched him ably cut through a tree root when he helped to bury my dog a couple of years ago.  I wonder if we need somehow to be more open to the complexities of our relationships to trees and be careful not to disregard the more pragmatic uses of trees.  This is what the farmer seemed to be saying at Fridays conference, he reminded everyone that as well as managing rivers and trees he was growing food and the growing of food is important.

All these things about trees are all at work together, the pragmatics the use of timber, the landscapes of childhood, the relationships to what we think and  what we do, what we know and what we choose not to know. 

Drax Power station near where I grew up burns 6 millions tons of  wood pellets a year as a country we produce around 300 thousand tons in the UK.  These are stark figures are also part of our tree project, they are powering my computer, mining bitcoin and will at some point probably be heating my house.  Our lives are intrinsically bound to the lives of trees in ways we cannot unravel.