trees
They're all around us, sticking up out of the earth. Late in the year, I began to really see their strangeness: these branchy, rooty cherubim, standing in mute witness to us, containing in their divisions and multiplications the key to the universe, if only we could see them clearly. They're plenty beautiful when garbed in summer green, but shocking in winter, in their splendid naked fractality. I can't drive by one now without fixing my eye on it and watching it twist by.
Here are some pictures I took one winter.
I love how the trees above define the space given them, creating that vaulting firmament for the mind to fly around in. The ones below are my trees of jubilation: they never fail to remind me of those strange passages of scripture that describe the trees shaking and clapping their hands in praise of the god who made them.
Look at this one in the center, below. Strength and grace in a single creature. It's the truest thing in the picture. How it condemns its humanmade surroundings.
The naked branches of a tree, seen against the sky, show us that tree's personality: yearning for the heavens, or commanding like bursting fireworks, or shaking forth in a delicious frenzy.
The naked eyes sees these trees, above, as a delicate and mighty world of axons and neurons. Filter it a bit, and they suddenly reveal their mathematical purity, their dramatic interconnectedness:
How strange they are, these porous friends and protectors. Infinitely varied, but even their randomness has an orderedness. To eventually meet them, or their encoder!
I took all these pictures in a single twenty-minute period on a single street, over twenty years ago.
Here are some pictures I took one winter.
I love how the trees above define the space given them, creating that vaulting firmament for the mind to fly around in. The ones below are my trees of jubilation: they never fail to remind me of those strange passages of scripture that describe the trees shaking and clapping their hands in praise of the god who made them.
Look at this one in the center, below. Strength and grace in a single creature. It's the truest thing in the picture. How it condemns its humanmade surroundings.
The naked branches of a tree, seen against the sky, show us that tree's personality: yearning for the heavens, or commanding like bursting fireworks, or shaking forth in a delicious frenzy.
The naked eyes sees these trees, above, as a delicate and mighty world of axons and neurons. Filter it a bit, and they suddenly reveal their mathematical purity, their dramatic interconnectedness:
How strange they are, these porous friends and protectors. Infinitely varied, but even their randomness has an orderedness. To eventually meet them, or their encoder!
I took all these pictures in a single twenty-minute period on a single street, over twenty years ago.
Comments