The woods behind the fields are guarded by a crumbling stone wall and a maze of pricker bushes with thorns an inch long. It takes a bit of maneuvering to navigate a path, and it’s quite difficult to do with a dog who insists on following you on your adventure. Still, we eventually made it through into the trees’ shadow-filled world.
They instantly reminded me of a favorite book from my younger years, The Lost Years of Merlin, and how the trees have their own language. The wind moaning, branches creaking and shifting…it isn’t hard to imagine them speaking to each other, wondering what intruder has entered their canopy of twisting vines and groping roots.
J.R.R. Tolkien also imagined trees speaking their own tongue in Lord of the Rings. The Ents protected tree-spirits and could speak many languages, but mainly used Quenya and Entish (The Complete Guide to Middle Earth, pg. 156). Many people are familiar with Treebeard (known as Fangorn in the Sindarin language), who roused his fellow Ents to defend Fangorn Forest against Saruman.
Trees are often referenced as wise creatures in literature and movies (think of the recent Avatar)–but why? Is it because of their great age and strong stature? There is a mystery that surrounds trees, in that they are so beautifully alive and yet so confined to live for hundreds, even thousands, of years in one spot. It’s so easy to think of trees having souls, of being aware of their surroundings, even having emotions.
Methuselah, nearly 5,000 years old. A bristlecone pine.
The trees I photographed aren’t thousands of years old, but their character is still obvious, and they are breathtaking. How long have their roots dug deep into the ground? And how much longer will they stand, until some force of nature (or human hand), causes them to fall?
It takes a bit of maneuvering to navigate a path, and it’s quite difficult to do with a dog who insists on following you on your adventure. Still, we eventually made it through into the trees’ shadow-filled world.
The Junk Drawer 