12.17.14 Here Is The Way Of It

Here, is the way of it. You are a seed. You are dropped by a parent tree, down down into the silt filled earth, in the outwaters of the Connecticut River.

As seasons pass, the waters flood, and then the waters recede. Back and forth, back and forth, with storms, heavy rains, droughts, and seasonal changes. If you grow where you're planted, which trees certainly do, the fittest survive. They survive the flooding. 

And in this place, there is often plenty of water, moreso than the higher grounds. And so these trees grow tall and wide and strong and remarkable.

Some of them live to be 150, or more years old. But here's the thing.

Eventually if there's enough flooding, or rains, they begin to rot at the base of the trunk. Oh, the beavers come and chew a selective few. But what you see here? 

Are towering Giants, that at some point, with heavy winds, or perhaps a perfectly respectable early morning, have one last moment of living. Now, we know from that cool scientist that the tree realizes it is rotting through, and about to crash to the ground. And it begins to send to the surrounding trees its resources, and it's resourceful wisdom.

Because, scientifically, we now understand that trees do this. And other things. They connect from their own root system, through the mycelium that forms a network within the earth, to other living things.
I'm imagining that only creatures and insects are around to witness all these giants smashing to the ground, when they do.

But it seems that they can live for a long long time, with no seedlings about that I can see, and then finally down they go, broken off from the base of their trunk. What a sound that must be. How the ground must shake! And here they all are, aware of each other, as they live by the flowing waters of the stream, that feeds into the Outwaters, and down into the Connecticut.

Invariably. Inevitable. The way lives come and go. Lives that are not ours. 

To come upon this place, of so many aged trees, with no seedlings in sight, the silted muddy bed of earth beneath them today, as the pup and I walk through. 

We gaze at the living, the rotting, and the fallen. 

Trying to imagine what it would be like to be a tall splendid thing with the roots, 
growing in this neighborhood.

 Where this is simply how it is.