Lately I have a new agenda on my walks in the woods--I’m trying to see every tree as an individual.
When I go onto the mountain behind my house, I study each tree, trying to see what makes it different from the other trees. I notice not just the big, majestic ones or the ones with gnarly trunks--I look at every one.
For instance, it’s surprising how many small trees grow a mere foot or two away from huge trees. You would think the competition would destroy the smaller tree. But instead the two trees embrace, their trunks sometimes meeting halfway up, their branches intersecting.
There’s a clearing on the plateau, a waterlogged section that is not hospitable to the forest trees. The trees around the edge of the clearing thrust their branches into the sunlight. One red maple trunk makes an arc toward the space, its highest branches contorting and mixing with the branches of an ash whose base is forty feet away. Even enormous pines list toward the sunlight.
The trees all wear skirts of moss from the moisture, just around the bottom twenty inches or so of trunk—I never noticed that before, in my years of walking here.
But these trees are all unusual, molded by the clearing. I want to appreciate every tree. I look around for an ordinary tree. How about this little beech? It’s quite typical, still wearing its brown, curled leaves. But how elegantly beautiful! No, it’s not ordinary. What about the pines, so many of them, so similar—but this one has an oddly shaped knot at eye level, and that one has a sheaf of bark separating just over a root.
The more I hunt for ordinariness, the more extraordinary things I find.
