The cold keeps me inside. My days are cluttered by mechanical things—furnace whir, images on computer screens, disembodied voices coming through wires, and the plastic touch of medical equipment. The thirst for something real draws me outside as noon approaches with its promise of relative warmth.
An ancient beech tree stands guard by my kitchen window. Its trunk tells stories in lichen and bark-healed scars. I roll my wheelchair across frozen ground until my weak hand finds its surface. The rough bark beneath my fingers releases something tight within my chest – like finding a letter from a dear friend long missing.
I rest here. Below, roots probe winter earth. Above, bare branches write prayers against blue sky. This touch bridges worlds.
We humans prize our thoughts, treating the mind as divine. Yet consciousness grew like any other trait—a tool for survival, nothing more, like a woodpecker’s probing beak or a raccoon’s clever paw.
Our ancestors used a sense of time and space to find spring berries and track autumn geese. Using an ability to remember, they could map the world in which they lived. They learned to slice the world into here and there, now and then. Developing language allowed these maps to be shared. Powerful tools for survival, but like all maps, these are useful but simplified and flattened representations of what is.
The beech tree knows better. My mind insists it stands separate, its life bounded by seed and fallen wood. Yet physicists investigating the edges of what we know speak of space and time shifting like morning mist. Unreliable measures. The tree simply is – complete, unbroken. Only our limited vision draws these lines.
We build our days from such useful illusions. We name things, fix them in place, expect them to stay. Then reality shifts – leaves fall, houses burn, jobs vanish, communities scatter, loved ones fade, health fails – and we suffer, shocked by truths our maps contradict.
Like a bat finding its way by sound or a snake reading heat in darkness, our consciousness reveals just one slice of what is. No more complete than any other creature’s view.
So I return to the tree, bark rough beneath failing fingers. Here is truth beyond the tidy boundaries of thought. This touch. This earth. This sky. This moment. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Such.