A Love of Wild Trees

Contemplating the tree of the world…

And this is the seventh in a series, from http://tim.girvin.com/Entries/index.php.

Looking skyward,
stars hang in the balance,
branched — bound
in light, spanning —
circling the mooned night.

I saw this and imagined that: light — starbound in the branches of trees.

There is beauty to be found in the mystery of the trees. And there are many that have written me back, reflecting on the character of their experience — with, and in, trees. To each, their own.

In walking in them, being with them, we are drawn back to the heart of something that brings us back to our beginnings, in the center of nature, awash with oxygen, scent of fertility, the lush green light, the sound of rustling, the quivering life of birds that gambol the broad reach of them.

The poet Mary Oliver [Thirst] shares:

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

When I contemplate that, I meditate on the ancient conceptions — the archetypes — of trees. And in photographing this last week (above), a seasonally lit tree in NYC, shooting through, to the full moon encased above, I think about their symbolism. The tree that holds up the world.

This idea is about a symbolic vision of the world that is held together, in the layers of experience, between the realm beneath — the underworld; the platter of the earth — the middle earth; and finally, the mantle above — the sky, the mantle of heaven.

This concept expresses the layering of meaning of what we see, and what might lie beneath: the symbolic world. Symbol is a word that is about 1800 years old. Probably older…

Going backwards in time, exploring the etymology, the etymon– the true meaning; it goes like this: circa 1434, it was a “creed, summary, religious belief,” from Late Latin, symbolum “creed, token, mark,” from Greek — symbolon as a “token, watchword” (applied around 250 by Cyprian of Carthage to the Apostles’ Creed, on the notion of the “mark” that distinguishes — in a symbolic device — Christians from pagans), from syn- “together” + stem of ballein “to throw.” The sense in the evolution of its use is “throwing things together” to “contrasting” to “comparing” to the framing of a “token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine.” Hence, the “outward sign” of something. The meaning “something which stands for something else” first recorded 1590 (in “Faerie Queene”). Symbolic, as a reference in use, is attested from 1680.

So it’s an old word. The idea is about a gathering, a link, a connection, a thread. And that symbolism is in the heart of the tree in the imaginings of humankind.

The tree of the world is called: Yggdrasill, Axis Mundis, World Tree, Cosmic Pillar, Center of the World.

In one of my earlier notes, I’d referenced drawing this concept for my father’s office (he, too, being a lover of trees) in 1979. This was Yggdrasill, hand-drawn and silkscreened on in a grouping of 4 panels, two by four foot Lexan:

This idea is ubiquitous. It’s not merely something that links to specific parts, peoples, or forms of spirituality of the world consciousness, but rather something that is found, literally, everywhere.

These, and more.

The Nordic World Ash: Yggdrasill

The Mahameru temple site, Bali, tree of the world, Indonesia

The world pillar symbolized: Kang Rinpoche, Mount Kailas, Tibet

The Celtic World Oak, the tree of answers: quercus

The Aztec World Tree of Life

The Tree of Life of the Egyptians

The Assyrian Tree of Life

The Christian Tree of Life

The Tree of Life, Wat Xiang Tong, Luang Prabang, Laos

I believe that the concept of the tree, as a symbolic archetype, captures the spirit of enclosure and giving; it is about protection and nourishment, it is shade, housing, temple. It is a teacher of patterning, of strength, of roots and stability in placemaking. And, in a way, it is likely the reasoning for why, and how, we can come to even creating place for ourselves.

The architectural theorist and designer, Juhani Pallasmaa: “the tree … is also one of mankind’s most common and meaningful symbols - take the Cosmic Tree, the Tree of Life, the Tree of Fertility, the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of the Soul, the Tree of History and the Sacrificial Tree. These diverse associations are hidden in the shape of the tree and even today add dimension to our relations with wood. The tree is man’s shape and we feel it our equal”.

Story told: beauty unfold: meaning bold.

tsg | nyc
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References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_mundi
http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/index.php?one=azt&two=sto&tab=two&id=332
http://blog.baliwww.com/glossary/170/
http://www.unspecial.org/UNS640/t47.html

Sometimes, the work of the weekend is complex enough, with writing, drawing and research — prepping and creating projects — that there’s no time for anything else.

But, being on the island this weekend, I’d found that a remarkably balanced cairn — one that lasted literally for years, amidst the rain, storms and wild winds had fallen. This cairn was the Wanderer cairn — but in celebration of that; and as an opening memorial to my youngest brother, Matt Girvin. That morning that my father called with the news of his loss — I was standing outside, next to that standing stone. The later installation, the balanced arrangement shown above, I made with Dawn Clark.

Sometime during the storms of the last week that exquisitely balanced stone fell. And split. Shown, above…

So we wandered again to the beach below, looking for the right stone, to array yet again. There were other arrangements:

We did find one, hauling it from the beach in a canvas bag, climbing the cliffs to get back to the foundation stone, and balancing it, cleft to cleft, found home and true.

And the new installation, set — perhaps —

for more years of guarding the Wanderer spirit…

Wander on, Wanderer…

Tim Girvin | Decatur Island

Friends have responded with imagery and stories.

And ideas.

Paul Stamets with the CBS News

Photo: Dusty Yao

CBS News (Discovery and Sunday Morning News) came out and spent the day with me filming. We took them into the mountains and found the rare Agarikon: Fomitopsis officinalis.

Dusty took this photo of them filming me in the Old Growth forest. there is a Fomitopsis officinalis in the background, and I see a distinct face on the tree to the left.

Seems appropriate for Halloween !

Dawn Clark, AIA LEED AP

tree lover

gorgeous set of images…

I love these places — there’s no place more spiritually fulfilling…

wow – cool! I’ve got some images of trees with eyes, too..

here are some others, more toward the spiritual place..

tree-ferns of bali

firs of the cascades

bamboo forest of kyoto

moss tree forest of chele la pass Bhutan

too many more…hundreds – I’m working on one blog – trees + architecture

it seems that all spiritual architecture is just an attempt at replicating what the trees create – their light-filtering canopies, enveloping structures, deep-earth-wood scented floors.

Chie Masuyama, Creative Director, Girvin | Seattle (a co-traveler to the temple compound forest outside Tokyo)

Pam Perry, world traveler and blogger:

Thanks Tim for following along on my adventure. I’m grateful for every
beautiful minute along the path. I feel so ALIVE.

I looked at your diary and love your observations on trees. I have a
particular favorite one in Costa Rica that is believed to be nearly
5,000 years old. I sat in the bellows of that tree and pondered the
many ways it had been supporting the people of that land for so many
years. I have a photo, but unfortunately don’t have access to it right
now. It’s one of the most spiritual places - sitting amid that tree -
that I’ve ever been.

Stuart Balcomb | Transcendent musician and composer
In 1973 I spent the summer with my then-father-in-law in La Push, Wa., commercial fishing for salmon. My sister joined me for a few days, and one night we went deep into the rain forest, lay on our backs, and gazed upward at the stars that were barely visible through the tops of the trees. It was perhaps the most comfortable “bed” I’ve ever laid on. What impressed me the most was the sound, or lack of, in that majestic forest. The silence had a bigness that came from the cosmos, as if the vacuum contained the faint echoes of every sound ever emitted. I was also very aware of the roots that extended downward below my back, perhaps as far down as the trees went up. For that brief but endless moment my body felt the curvature of the earth. I was being pushed through space toward the galaxies above, and I was truly a space traveler.

Written from Lima, Peru

Cecile Thomas | Creative Director: Silverstein-Thomas-Rice
I love trees, I seek them out on my journeys. There is deep comfort in aligning one’s spine to their spine.
On my way to Portugal with Bill Thompson next to me. Will look at trees and think of you.

Being in the place of trees…

And this is the seventh in a series, from http://tim.girvin.com/Entries/index.php.

When I contemplate the place of the tree in my heart, I go there in my mind. And I go back to many forests, in many parts of the planet, that take me back to where it began, that connectedness, in the center of me — to the forest: the love of wild trees.

I hold that experience in my body and soul wholly — the scent, the taste, the hearing, the touch, the sight. It is reaching to me fully.

I wonder about you, what’s your sense of your story in the place — made — in forest? What images do you have to share — for this story?

Sacred grove compound, buddhist complex, japan.

Silence, snow, aspen.

cloud, prayer flag forest — lolo pass, bhutan

mist forest, mount merapi, java

sunrise, ponderosa, idaho

temple forest pathway, bali, indonesia

fall, fallen, san juan county

forest ascent, the himalayas

To each of these places, and surely many others that you’ve experienced — each, your own story — there is a recounting of the power of the surround, the atmosphere of the forest. Whether darkly ancient, light and newly founded, sparse and wildswept mountainous, pine formed or leafy broad, rich and green or forlornly barren as winter forests — each has a place in the mind, and in experience — that will never be forgotten.

What about you? What mind fullness, what forest memory do you hold?

tsg | decatur island

The oldest souls in the world…

And this is the fifth in a series, from http://tim.girvin.com/Entries/index.php.

Being a walker, and a runner, I like to study trees wherever I go. And I look for old trees.

I look at them from a number of perspectives. How healthy are they? What kind of leaves do they have, what about the bark, where do their roots go? And this is something about how to sense the age of a tree. Looking at a tree, studying their time on the planet — there is the scale of the leaves — the profusion of their arrangement — how do they fill out space, creating place? As a variation in considerations, what is the mass of the foliage — as a tree ages, it increasingly reaches out, filling a volume in responding to the movement of the Sun. Studying the trunk, the size of it, is another clue to understanding age. Old trees are bigger — their trunks are larger — and looking down, studying how they have impacted, literally, the earth, you can see more about their balance. How are they “holding” the earth, how do they embrace it?

Being in NYC, there’s a tree there in Central Park, north of the reservoir, that’s the oldest tree in New York. The London Planetree. It’s a great tree for urban living, it survives city life — like the American Sycamore or the Western Planetree. This is, as well, the tallest tree in NYC. It is planted all over Brooklyn.

In San Francisco, the oldest trees are north of the city, in the Muir Woods, the redwood groves. Yet further out, in the White Mountain Range, over Tioga Pass, lie groves of trees that are far older. There is Methuselah (estimated germination 2832 BC), a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) which was 4,789 years old when sampled in 1957 by Schulman and Harlan, tree scientists and dendrochronologists studying tree age for insights. It is the oldest known non-clonal organism (a genet, or genetically individual) still alive, at the age of about 4,839 years old.

The Methuselah Grove in the Inyo Forest

There are others that have been cherished, and known, for generations. The Castagno dei Cento Cavalli, from Sicily, at 4,000 years of age,

the Sarv-e-Abarkooh, the Zoroastrian Sarv — a Cypress from Abarkooh, Iran. the Llangernyw Yew of Wales, below, aged 4000 years.

Still, this past year, the oldest living thing, a tree, has been found on the planet.

Scientists discovered the 13 foot tall (4 meter tall) spruce growing at an altitude of 2,985 feet (910 meters) on Fulu Mountain but it is thought its roots actually sprouted just after the end of the last ice age, nearly 10,000 years ago, and the lone survivor has been cloning itself ever since.

Leif Kullmann photo

These trees were found perched high on a mountainous region, the Dalarna province, where they were protected from logging and intrusion — but tempered by hundreds of years of harsh weather conditions, bridged between Norway and Sweden.

The discovery showed trees of 375, 5,660, 9,000 and 9,550 years old and everything displayed clear signs that they have the same genetic makeup as the trees above them. Since spruce trees can multiply with root penetrating braches, they can produce exact copies, or clones.

The tree now growing above the finding place and the wood pieces dating 9,550 years have the same genetic material. The actual has been tested by carbon-14 dating at a laboratory in Miami, Florida, USA.

The old ones, contemplated:

The spirit of the old trees is what they bring to us, what experiences have passed in the movement of the planet and their watching presence, as our lives come and go. That turning is a meditation. As the leaves turn, so do ours, in the momentum of time. So in my experience, looking at trees, the spirit that lies within them, the young ones, the old ones — it’s about that contemplation of temporal beauty.

Looking at trees, especially the old ones, the silent meditation is on my movement, my place — in the passing of things — knowing that, as I go on, they too, go on.

And doing that, what am I looking at, what am I looking for, is the study of beauty in emergence.

New York City Trees: http://forestry.about.com/od/forestryphotofeatures/ss/northpark_trees_8.htm
The Methuselah Grove: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_tree
The Pando Grove at 1,000,000 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
Life is short, savor:
http://theos.in/natural-world/oldest-tree-2/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080414-oldest-tree.html

Drawing trees…

And this is the fourth in a series, from http://tim.girvin.com/Entries/index.php.

There is the gesture — the drawing in place — of how trees fill up the space, and the place, in which they live.

In looking at the patterning of the tree, have you noticed how the green fills the place of their being? What I mean is that the green of the tree somehow “knows” how to fill the space of their “being”. The very existence of the place fills out the volume of how — and where — they live.

Studying the tree, you can see how it fills up the presence that it holds — looking at the openings that surround a tree, it reaches out, gathers the light, and holds that energy in building out the richness of the foliage — its living growth in the space. Green goes. And grows.

And speaking of gestures, my exploration of trees has been about drawing them — in dozens of books, journals, over time.

But in some of them, the drawing is less about exploring the idea of the space that they hold, but about the space that they do not.

In classical Chinese and Japanese painting, the character of the rendering — the spirit of it — is about drawing with the strokes of the brush in the character of something that is not there. It’s less about the black-inked delineations of the sumi-yeh, drawn stroke, it’s about the white that shows more — the paper that shows the presence of the object.

It’s about drawing what’s not there, by drawing what’s there — and leaving the rest, to imagining.

When I look at anything. I look for what’s there.

And what’s not. And draw the space in between.

Do you draw what you see, or what you don’t — and merely imagine?

tsg | decatur island
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http://tim.girvin.com/Entries/?p=252
http://tim.girvin.com/journals/index.html