4:42am January 6, 2012

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“There’s a moment during a climb when you lose yourself,” he said. “You don’t have a name anymore. When you find yourself in a place in nature where if you make a mistake you will die, you become open to what’s around you. You start feeling the limits of your perceptions as a human being. You perceive time more clearly in redwoods, and you see time’s illusory qualities.”

We were looking down into a vast bowl of ferns out of which the three titans grew. “When you feel one of these trees moving, you get a sense of it as an individual,” Sillett said.

“Do you really think of a tree as an entity?” I asked.

“It’s a being. It’s a ‘person,’ from a plant’s point of view. A tree is not conscious, the way we are, but it has a perfect memory. This is because the trunk of a tree continually records everything that happens to it as it grows. Plants are very different from us, but they begin life the same way we do, as a sperm and an egg. People think of trees as objects, just something by the side of the road, like a rock. Trees are responsive and alive. They react more slowly than we do, but see how intricate they become. Kronos started from a seed as big as a fingernail clipping, and it did this.”

We were surrounded by buttresses, platforms, and Gothic towers, reaching out of sight. The Atlas grove is believed to be the oldest grove of redwoods on the planet, and we were aloft in what is thought to be the oldest part. Zeus Tree may have been alive when the worship of the god was strong in the cities of Hellas.

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13 notes