Trees

At some point I realized I take a lot of photos of trees…

You had me at trees

August 4

Trees often have my attention. I find myself thinking about the spot where a tree is standing. Whether its seed fell there, or someone planted it, that spot is it. The tree is simply going to stand there as the sun whips across the sky thousands of times. I imagine the tree turning its leaves quickly (in tree time) to catch what light it can during each flash overhead.

Intrigued by this unheard of species, Wang set out to see it for himself and to collect specimens, which he shared with colleagues. One of them was Hsen Hsu Hu. A diligent paleobotanist, he had read of Miki’s fossil discovery five years earlier. As soon as he saw the peculiar needle pattern, Hu recognized the “water fir” as a Metasequoia.

~ Maria Popova from, https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/01/31/dawn-redwood-metasequoia/

There’s a lot of interesting leaps in the story Popova shares. Across a war, across two cultures, but the vast time this tree has crossed is insane. We have fossils of this tree… and we still have the live tree. My mind boggles.

But mostly, Popova had my attention at trees.

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Photography from Seattle

October 10

For several years I’ve been attending the Art of Retreat events in North America. Originally they were held in New York City, but the latest three were held outside of Seattle. I’ve been recording conversations for Art of Retreat’s own podcast over the years. If you’re interested in what goes on behind the scenes, I tried to unpack some of it over on a topic in the Podcaster Community, Field Recordings at Art of Retreat 2022.

I have a habit of trying to capture interesting photos from airplane windows. Often it’s solar or weather phenomenon, but on this trip out to Seattle I was surprised to see these forest fires. Fortunately, they weren’t very close to where the event was held, but “fire fog” was thing during much of the time I spent in Seattle and all of the time at the event.

Photos from the flight out to Seattle WA.

A few shots from the location where the event was held…

View from the bunk-house porch, and from the lake shore.

And one last random shot from a cool, mushroom–infused coffee spot in Seattle, Wundergrond Coffee.

Quite the knitting project for someone.

Random, but fun photos — hope you enjoyed them.

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You had me at “tree”

October 2

“A tree is a little bit of the future,” Wangari Maathai reflected as she set out to plant the million trees that won her the Nobel Peace Prize. But a tree is also an enchanted portal to the past — a fractal reach beyond living memory, beyond our human histories, into the “saeculum” of time.

~ Maria Popova from, https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/04/07/peattie-giant-sequoia/

I recently flew from Philadelphia to Seattle. At one point in the journey I gazed down at the Cascade Mountains from the miraculous perch of technology that is an airliner, staring silently at countless trees in countless valleys.

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Saeculum

July 31, 2022

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.

~ Rebecca Solnit from, https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/02/09/rebecca-solnit-trees/

Trees are simply magical. Carl Sagan made a point in the original Cosmos series that everything uses the same basic machinery to read, and write using the same four “letters” of DNA. In a very real sense, trees are us with some different initial inputs. (Setting aside the more ephemeral, yet critical ways where we differ starkly from trees, like degree of consciousness, self-awareness, spirit, soul?) Stand next to an old enough tree and one is invariably transported to a higher level of thinking about being.

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Zoomed way, way out

August 4, 2021

It’s true that such adaptations are now anachronistic; they have lost their relevance. But the trees have been slow to catch on; a natural consequence of the pace of evolution. For a tree that lives, say, 250 years, 13,000 years represents only 52 generations. In an evolutionary sense, the trees don’t yet realize that the megafauna are gone.

~ Whit Bronaugh from, https://blog.longnow.org/02014/06/24/ecological-anachronisms/

There’s an effect in film making which you’ve seen but may not have realized exactly what you were seeing: The dolly zoom shot. “The dolly zoom is a famous technique invented by Alfred Hitchcock for his 1958 film Vertigo. The shot is achieved by simultaneously tracking backwards or forwards while zooming in or out.”

The narrator is too breathless for my tastes, but still, take a few minutes to watch this explanation of the dolly-zoom. You can thank me later: https://nofilmschool.com/2017/05/watch-what-dolly-zoom-can-do-you

Ahem. Now, back to my top-quote and what I wanted to say in the first place…

Text-based, disorienting dolly-zoom!

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Trees

May 28, 2021

But among all of nature’s beauties, nothing inspired him more than trees — those eternal muses of scientists, artists, philosophers, and poets alike — and what Margaret Fuller so unforgettably called “that best fact, the Moon.”

~ Maria Popova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/03/22/hasui-kawase-prints/

I hesitated to share this. …because the book she’s writing about is out of print and only rather-expensive copies seem obtainable. But obviously I came down on the side of, “it’s trees, I have to share this.”

I was once in random conversation with a professional arborist. I cannot recall for certain even who or where or what we were discussing. (But I’m certain is wasn’t something as obvious as they were at my house trimming a tree. It had to be some social encounter.) He dropped a phrase which has stuck with me ever since. He mentioned, “caring for The Big Plants.” I feel that, somehow, he said it in capitals, just like that.

I’ve seen a couple of trees in my day; in Muir Woods, off the beaten paths in Japan, the Rockies. There are some singularly towering specimens in my neighborhood. I like to snap random photos of trees too. I don’t have a point coming, either.

Way back in “the day,” Carl Sagan made a comment in one of the original Cosmos episodes about DNA. As I recall, he was standing near a Big Plant, as that arborist would say, and he pointed out that we, and the tree, contain identical machinery for processing identically functioning DNA. There’s just a relatively small amount of encoded information making a “me” instead of a tree.

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Go for a walk in the woods and listen to this

February 14, 2018

Imagine you’re walking through a forest. I’m guessing you’re thinking of a collections of trees — what we foresters call a “stand” — with their rugged stems and their beautiful crowns. Yes, trees are the foundation of forestes, but a forest is much more than what you see.

~ Suzanne Simard from, https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other

Go for a walk in the woods, and listen to this short TED talk. You may go into the wood seeing trees, but you’ll come out having heard much more.

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Bertolt

December 22, 2017

Unlike the other townspeople, who are constantly doing things together, he is content in his own company — a perfect embodiment of the great film director Andrei Tarkovsky’s advice to the young.

Most of all, the boy cherishes his time with Bertolt — the ancient oak he loves to climb.

~ Maria Popova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/05/12/bertolt-jacques-goldstyn/

Trees.

More recently I’ve been drawn more strongly to photographing them, standing under them and just generally appreciating them.

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Sarah P Duke Gardens

April 29, 2016

Perspective and scale; Tiny moss or a hill covered in tall grass? Bald Cypress tree or the leg of an enormous dinosaur? Towering Red Oak tree or a single neuron? Moss on a rock or an Alpine mountain face with a distant forest? Spending the morning trying to exercise my visual perspectives.

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Sport Climbing at Mary’s Lake

August 30, 2014

The local gear shop in Estes Park suggested a couple spots to do some top-roping nearby before heading into Rocky Mountain National Park.

We spent several hours climbing 20 foot routes up this “little” rock next to Mary’s Lake. I think I did 7 or 8 routes practicing footwork and technique with Mike either lecturing on details, or scrambling up to show me examples.

…unfortunately, neither of us took pictures of the climbing. Good practice, but not very photogenic.

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