Beneath the Cottonwood 3

~thebogboys

##BENEATH THE COTTONWOOD 3

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

I made it to the end of this path, a path I carved through this thick and seemingly impenetrable brush, such that I could gaze upon the object of my desire: an old-growth cottonwood tree. It is an impressive specimen. Its trunk spans at least four feet, the patterning of the bark a lattice of knurls and deep cracks. The age plays upon the surface of this bark as the crows-feet and wrinkles upon the elder's face, and no less wise is this woody giant. Several great arms spread out at about ten feet, and nestled in the pit formed there is a bittersweet nightshade, and a thin creek of sap running down the surface of the bark. I wonder how long this plant has been growing here, how it managed to take root here and whether it was somehow an epiphyte. My eyes continue upward. It is here that my perspective well and truly shifts, that my ego melts away. It is in these moments that I can recognize that in my day-to-day, I am not really looking at things around me, but instead something sits between my self and my senses, filtering my vision through some unknowable meddling force that somehow diminishes the subject I lay my eyes upon. The trees are a little less colorful, movement is somehow less graceful.

The filters all fall away from me. It is here that I am no longer "looking at" the tree, but I am absorbing the visual spectacle of the tree, no more processing it than a camera lens does. My eyes are wide open, and they are a vehicle for pure light and color to reach my brain. A remarkable realization comes to me in an instant: everything we look at is nothing more than layers of basic colors and shapes. The canopy of the cottonwood is not REALLY composed of wood and leaves, but instead a combination of still, movement, green, brown, white.

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

The sky is as a marble, a great featureless bluish-grey, forming a canvas to paint the tree upon. The branches are stenciled against this backdrop, fixtures unyielding to the prevailing winds, dark and serene and steadfast. The leaves are not seen as a three-dimensional cloud of color and motion, but as two separate planes superimposed over one another, and interwoven into the branches. In back I see more of the tans and greys of the leaves as they are illuminated by the sky, loping gently to and fro from the rocking gales. The finer motions of the lamina are lost here in the distance, and only the generalized sloshing of the thinnest branches can be transmitted. In front of it all, though, there exist more whites and greens, the detail of the triangular leaves preserved, their minute trembling in the breeze visible. All of these planes of vision are experienced at once and in totality, and my mind and body are held in rapture. I have transformed into the eye-ball, and my body and self melts away. My whole existence is this tree, and the sky that covers it.

-=-.o._.o.-=-‾-=-.o._.o.-=-

Time is naught, the Anxiety is cast away. If only I could show this experience to everyone, I know that crime and war would cease to exist. I know we could all live as brothers and sisters, and we could achieve unification. I know that I live in a lost generation, and with every tree we cut down, every acre of land that is "developed", the tethers to our nature are inexorably cut, likely never to return in our lifetimes. Man is a creature plagued by Time. We live too short of lives to have perspective on how our actions impact the earth. We are haunted by our mortality and rather than come to terms with it, we seek the false reliefs of religion and leisure activities, we seek meaning through our work, we seek to dominate others and ensure our security, but it is all for nothing. Death comes for us all.

-=-.o._.o.-=-‾-=-.o._.o.-=-

evan@thebogboys.space