This story and poem is part of the Universe in Verse book.
Trees provide us with some of the richest metaphors for our lives – a polished lens for the quality of attention we pay to the world. William Blake wrote: “A tree that makes some cry tears of joy to others is just a green thing standing in the way. Walt Whitman considered them our greatest teachers in living authentically. For Hermann Hesse, the key to happiness was to learn to listen to the trees.”
But beyond the realm of man-made metaphors, trees are outstanding natural wonders, striking in folk poetry for their biological and natural truth. Their photosynthesis is nature's way of making life through light. Chlorophyll – which shares a chemical relationship with hemoglobin in our blood – allows the tree to capture photons, release part of its energy to make the sugars that make up the tree – the raw material of leaves and bark and roots and branches – and then release the photons at low frequencies back into the atmosphere. The tree is the catch of the life-enhancing light from the air – the great eye that looks out for the light of the universe.
Trees hungrily absorb red light – the longer wavelengths of the visible spectrum – but neighboring infrared passes right through them. Under the canopy, where the competition for these wavelengths is intense, red light fades and infrared dominates. Although trees cannot absorb infrared, they, unlike humans, can “see” through chemical photoreceptors called phytochromes. The balance between the two types of light tells the trees how much to grow and in which direction, phytochromes act as on-off switches for growth. An overflowing red light under an uncrowded sky lights a switch, telling the tree to spread its branches wide through any gaps in the canopy; in the dense shade where infrared dominates, the button turns off, reducing the growth of side branches and causing the tree to grow straight up, reaching for the open sky above.
As summer fades into autumn, cooling the air and dimming the light, the alchemy of converting light into growth becomes more costly for deciduous trees. Chlorophyll begins to degrade, revealing other pigments that have been there all along – xanthophyll yellow, carotenoid orange, anthocyanins red and purple, turning the canopy into an aria of color.
Meanwhile, the layer of cells that hold the stem to the branch breaks down. The leaves begin to drop – a process known as abscission.
But as he cleans the branches, he reveals the hidden nubs of new shoots that have been forming all summer, learning to grow next spring.
Winter trees of bones and lungs rise to the leaden sky, their skin a braille poem of resilience.
HOPE
by Jane HirshfieldMore and more I have enjoyed fitness.
Not the easy resistance of the pillow, his foam
it returns again and again to the same state, but it is sinuous
the intensity of the tree: finding the light has just closed on one side,
it turns into another. Blind intelligence, of course.
But because of such persistence turtles and rivers appeared,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unrelenting world.
