Trees are calming

 

I like the trees in my cemetery, they are well established but also  quite wild.  The cherries are small and British really just a Pit with a skin on them but the birds seem to like them.  As you walk in there is a line of large London Plane I used to think these were a type of Sycamore becuase of the leaves but I know better now.  

I was thinking today about all our projects and remembering a conversation where we decided that things worked well when the people involved could own their ideas and that these ideas were not fixed.   Language as Talisman, the archive of exile, Artists studio, fishing as wisdom.  All the titles are quite provocative yet open enough for them to evolve different meaning for different people.

I was thinking if treescapes held this ambiguity and then I started to consider my own personal relationship to trees.  How I encounter them, what they mean to me and how actually important they are to the living of a good life. I know I keep talking about Walden and Henry David Thoreau  but here I think is a good point to mark him with what seems like his most famous quote.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”