Trees are the forgotten nursery-symbionts who were the beloved companions and protectors of our species before and during the earliest phases of our ascent to representational awareness, and this relationship is no accident. It is no accident that the majority of our categorical and linguistic paradigms comprise tree-like implementations. We actually think in tree-like structures. Again, no accident. But apparently nearly no one can remember why…

I am sure is seems ridiculous to actually put something like this into language, which is the last place it belongs, but the simple, experientially accessible fact is that a tree is a being who is a transport and a way of seeing/knowing. A sort of living transmission/reception entity, which is uniquely and intimately connected to every other related structure throughout the everywhen. They are living windows into an impossibly sophisticated… body of being and relation.

We hold a wand or key or pencil; a sword or staff or paintbrush… but do not remember -why- any more. It has nothing to do with ‘magic’! Those shepherds, out on the land, at night, with their staff… their ‘crooks’…

Wood has become ‘a substance’. Trees are ‘a resource’, ‘an obstacle’ to ‘development’ or ‘a conservation target’. Such abstractions represent the most catastrophic of confusions. The world is not an object and its organs are no more produce for harvest than our own are.

Strangely, the two only emerge together, as complimentary and necessary relationals. Immersion in forests was the source of our minds. Exclusion from them not only dehumanizes us; it renders us in the image of the purposes of which it is the result. We become produce. Substance. An obstacle.

A ‘conservation target’.

I cannot be human without forests. Watching my species exchange them for tokens changes what it means to be human in a way that is intolerable for me. Perhaps if we can together remember a way to understand the meaning and power of trees directly, experientially, we will have some chance of creating an antidote to the disease that is ripping the biocognitive basis of our world apart for the sake of trinkets.