Some notes and reflections on the trees
“Memory of trees, trees of memory: the giants of our forests have not ceased surprising us and being transcended into works of art.” Giuseppe Penone
I share the idea found in Native American mythology: “Humans, animals, plants, we are all one single being”¹ and trees “also serves to symbolize the cyclical nature of cosmic evolution, death and regeneration”².
This birth-life-death cycle repeats itself. An emotion is born, lives, dies; a being is born, lives, dies; the same goes for an idea, a sensation, a moment. It's an inescapable cycle.
“Leaves evoke a cycle of trees that shed and recover their leaves every year”. According to Mircea Eliade³ “a tree looses its leaves and recovers them and [...] regenerates, it dies and is reborn countless times (Elit.235)”.
It's called the Tree of Life, “the backbone supporting the human body”⁴, the Temple of the Soul, the Path of Spirits, “the ascending path through which are belived to transit those who pass from the visible to the invisible”⁵. According to the Pueblo Indians, the great fir tree of the world allows souls to ascend, and its roots are the “ladder on which the ancestors could climb to the Earth of our Sun”⁶, Jacob's ladder, shamanic pole, etc.
The tree weaves links between the visible and the invisible, which the thread follows and materializes.
“The tree also connects the three levels of the Cosmos[...]The higher branches communicate with the sky, attracted by the Light,[...] the trunk of the tree and the lower branches communicate with the surface of the Earth”, and finally ‘the roots delve into the depths where they sink’ and explore the ‘underground’⁷ world.
The tree can also be the palaver tree, the sacred place under which we tell each other stories of where we come from and where we're going, the one I discovered walking through Dogon country...
¹ Wa-Na-Nee-Chee et Eliane Harvey, L’oracle de l’aigle blanc – Vivre au quotidien la sagesse des indiens d’Amérique, Éditions Solar, 1997, 118 p.
² Jean CHEVALIER, Alain GUEERBRANT, Dictionnaire des symboles, Éditions Robert Laffont/Jupiter, Collection Bouquins, 62 p.
³ Ibid., 63 p.
⁴ Ibid., 62 p.
⁵ Ibid., 62 p.
⁶ Ibid., 62 p.
⁷ Ibid., 62 p.
