Seasons may go round and round forever as trees remain themselves, handling natural and man-made conditions as they come. Sliding in and out of sunshine and snow times, holding their branches up for birds and saws alike, to nourish with fruit, nuts or sap, shelter, offer fuel and building material.
Growing up where there were plenty of woodlands, feeling calmed by trees from my earliest days on the planet, I’ve gotten a sense of community amongst the trees in a given area. There is the feeling that they come to depend upon one another in their positions, roots anchored into the soil, rock, supported by massive soil biomes unique to their place and time. Trees share so much more than we can see in our casual dealings with them.
Still or wind rubbed trees may appear to be non-sentient, yet if you close down your thoughts as you study them you may just detect inclinations on the part of their branches towards one another.
As this ponderosa pine and plum tree do, growing together close enough to easily mingle their branches, far enough apart to give space to the vital root systems.
There is a German forester who’s been in the news recently — Peter Wohlleben — for his long study of trees, detailed in his book The Secret Life of Trees: What They Feel How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World.
I mean to read it soon. Meanwhile I keep an eye on the five trees in my back yard, alongside their larger neighbors in other yards.
“Were one to observe with an eye that discovereth the realities of all things, it would become clear that the greatest relationship that bindeth the world of being together lieth in the range of created things themselves, and that co-operation, mutual aid and reciprocity are essential characteristics in the unified body of the world of being, inasmuch as all created things are closely related together and each is influenced by the other or deriveth benefit therefrom, either directly or indirectly.” ~’Abdu’l-Baha
Rising Over the Smoke 