The oldest souls in the world... And this is the fifth in a series, from https://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...

Drawing trees... And this is the fourth in a series, from https://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...

I've been a lover of trees, and a lover of being in trees. Up in trees. And this is the third in a series, from https://tim.girvin.com/Entries/index.php. I savor trees. And tree houses. Tree houses have been widely explored under my watch. Some of them have been wildly dangerous, rickety and teetering; some of them have been abandoned, others, freshly constructed. This began when I was a child -- since we had one at our house -- one that was progressively upgraded over the years by my father....

The story of the old, tall ones: Sequoia. And climbing them... Learning comes in differing ways. The conference for Technology, Entertainment & Design: TED, is one of them. I'm a member of the TED community. You go there, literally, to be a part of that sharing. And an extraordinary sharing it is. Through TED, I reconnected with the author Richard Preston. I'd first encountered him with his "Hot Zone" -- an adventuresome read into the wildfire disease spread -- the ranging (and raging) opening...

The tree prints | 1979. Girvins like trees. No, they love them. Every member of our family has some connection with trees. And I suppose that arboreal love could have some distant simian link, like the notion that if you suddenly jerk when you are just dozing off, it's a recollection of sleeping in trees. I don't know the reasons precisely why, but we love them. All kinds of them. And each of us has a special connection. I savor drawing them, photographing and being in them, forest spaces and...

Some time, there is no sound, but the calls of birds, that waft their notes, reaching out to me, in bringing the beginnings of the day, the life that we lead in finding again, beauty that rings round us as we gather in, to listen. tsg | decatur island | 5.55am

Caspar David Friedrich’s "Wanderer Above the Mist" [1818] I've often thought about the concept of wandering -- as a meditation on learning, exploring, finding answers. But in a way, as well, it's a path of deepening experience, because in wandering -- there is a meander in discovery. If you wander, to find a path, that veering -- it's a matter of finding a new way. Being out there, you find discoveries that are surprisingly sublime, mysterious, newly profound. There is learning that takes...

A friend of mine, just returning from China, Paula Rees, experienced the razor's edge of the darkest anguish in Sichuan, China. As did many of us. But that was nothing compared to the Chinese themselves -- the survivors -- those that were left. And she had a dream of a Phoenix rising, something to speak to this dark vision, this nightmare -- and a realization that perhaps I could help with, in fulfillment -- that would come from my heart, brushes and fist, fingers flowing out of that dream....

There are 8 stories. 8 ideas. And 8 ways of thinking about things. 8|8|8 1. On this door. There was a door, that was a door to somewhere else. In merely seeing the door, it was a vision to another place -- I knew that it went somewhere. I tried to get in. Any door takes us somewhere -- we walk through, and in passing the step, the transom, the lintel, the floor plate, the lock, the bolt, the knob -- we cross over. There we go, here we are. I found an 8 door -- and it didn't take me anywhere,...

The quiet now is so profound that the only thing making noise are the two raccoons that, walking like humans, have come to visit me, coming up the steps to my studio checking on my progress. tsg | decatur island 3.36am