After a day of climbing and trimming a tree, I sat in my pickup truck staring down as sunlight shown on my hand rested on my knee. The veins from the wrist to the knuckles were winding from what looked like root systems, tree trunks, flowing in and out of crotches into branches and I thought to myself; we all are trees. Each one of us is not alone to have pondered our own veins, just behind the thin veneer of skin and have seen mountains, tributaries, rivers, and streams.
Makers have their signature style. Whether dancer, writer, therapist, pianist, artist, architect, producer we can tell who drew what, who wrote what, who sang what, if we had seen or heard their works before. As for our own invisible, intelligent designer /designers, we’ve also experienced the works before. We are familiar to them, to the forming of earth, rivers, cosmos and trees, father, mother, daughters and sons, perhaps all too familiar at times it seems.
The signature stamp and design is that of a Creator of creators subtly behind the curtain of life and existence, yet in the middle of it all. Nature serves a purpose, as do we the curators. During the 48 out of my 68 years as a keeper of trees, there is a wind that’s sent, stirring up the largest of sleeping woody perennials, that primes the plumbing pumping system of vessels for macro and microelements and soil water to be translocated from the bottom to the top of the crowns of the trees.
A mass damping of limbs happens every March. ‘Mass damping’ is a critical process of engineering so that limbs sway in and out, separately back and forth, just like our own limbs flayed to and fro, steadying ourselves when we were kids keeping balance on a fallen tree limb on the ground. If trees were to list back and forth at the same time with the same force they would all fall over when summer’s storms come roaring.
There was a carpenter, counselor, healer, who once answered an older rabbi how to make it to the kingdom of heaven. “The wind comes from one direction and goes the other, yet no one knows where it comes from or where it’s going, and so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” He’s the same one who said, ‘they shall be as trees’.
Wendell Phillips ‘Phil Berwick
Arborist /Abolitionist
Founder of Living Tree Care Inc. & Living Tree International
314-568-8367 / livingtree@earthlink.net