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9:40pm May 23, 2013
youneedacat: (This caption will repeat several times because I’ve got about nine pictures to post of this tree.) This is a tree we always called the Mother Tree. It’s very close (yards, IIRC) from where we lived when I was born. It’s bigger than it even looks in the pictures. It’s got branches that practically look like trees themselves — they go out sideways, and then they grow up and down and look exactly like more redwood trees, floating in the air. I went back and took these pictures in 1999 when I was doing a school project on old-growth redwoods. I regret not taking any pictures of it at ground level. To be near this tree is just… really amazing. It’s not really possible to describe what it’s like without having been there. It has its own sense of being alive, and treeish, and old. I love to lie down in the grooves at the base of the tree and just stay there. And I’m not sure I ever will again. :-( Because I live 3500 miles away and travel is really, really difficult for me. But the way I usually think about it… is I’ll always have the memory of that place, and so many other cool places I’ve been that I’ll never be again. And that in itself is amazing. I can just go back to the memory and curl up under this tree any time I want to. Or I can go nearby and listen to the owls at night. My richest memories anywhere, hands down, come from this forest. And most of them are memories from a time when the only awareness I had of the world was by the feel of a place, the sense of a place, not the shutting-down-of-awareness that categorizes things and loses what they really are in the process. I can curl up in bed right now and just soak in the feel of that forest, any time I want to, and that means more to me than just about anything.

youneedacat:

(This caption will repeat several times because I’ve got about nine pictures to post of this tree.)

This is a tree we always called the Mother Tree. It’s very close (yards, IIRC) from where we lived when I was born. It’s bigger than it even looks in the pictures. It’s got branches that practically look like trees themselves — they go out sideways, and then they grow up and down and look exactly like more redwood trees, floating in the air. I went back and took these pictures in 1999 when I was doing a school project on old-growth redwoods. I regret not taking any pictures of it at ground level.

To be near this tree is just… really amazing. It’s not really possible to describe what it’s like without having been there. It has its own sense of being alive, and treeish, and old. I love to lie down in the grooves at the base of the tree and just stay there.

And I’m not sure I ever will again. :-( Because I live 3500 miles away and travel is really, really difficult for me. But the way I usually think about it… is I’ll always have the memory of that place, and so many other cool places I’ve been that I’ll never be again. And that in itself is amazing. I can just go back to the memory and curl up under this tree any time I want to. Or I can go nearby and listen to the owls at night. My richest memories anywhere, hands down, come from this forest. And most of them are memories from a time when the only awareness I had of the world was by the feel of a place, the sense of a place, not the shutting-down-of-awareness that categorizes things and loses what they really are in the process. I can curl up in bed right now and just soak in the feel of that forest, any time I want to, and that means more to me than just about anything.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone