Observe.
She of trunken glory. Boughs of gentle green swaying in the malodorous wind.
She of brown and dense bark, thick and protective. Home to hundreds of thousands of insects and creatures. An ecosystem unto itself, mighty and powerful. To cut her down takes strength and tools and vim and vigor. To destroy her entirely. Nigh impossible.
Let us start at the top.
Her treetips swing gorgeously in the wind, the pure emerald oval leaves swimming in the deep-blue sky. Slight and thin branches are covered in buds. A bird’s nest makes its home in these boughs, field with eggs and future. Small flowers, sprouted from ancient deposits of dirt and bird feces, grow in the light of the noonday sun. They reach up, suckling what little sustenance they can.
The boughs get thicker and thicker as we climb down, the bark becoming smoother and smoother in our delicate fingers, the climbing gear tight against your body. You are surrounded by her, embraced by her. You sit on a branch and stop for a moment. Feel her. Her dark brown bark, roiled by years of history and ancient conflicts against her surroundings. The peck of a hundred thousand woodpeckers. The home for a million termites.
We continue, reaching the brazen girth of her trunk, the straps around them gripping tightly, giving you the perfect angle to clamber down her body without harming her. For to harm her? This beast of unmoving ability. This plant, this massive living embodiment of the power of nature, tens of feet around, hundreds of rings of growth containing the history of the land around her. To cut into this thing, this life, you would see so much. A massive firestorm that destroyed the surrounding trees, leaving a ring of charcoal encased by her new living flesh. Drought. Ice. Frost. She is living history, life incarnate.
Reach her base, the spread of roots making miniature mountains in the ground. Do you understand what you are looking at? The interlocking life force of this ancient behemoth. Lay down on the forest floor. Feel the gnarled and twisted trunks of her lifeblood flowing. Feel the emanate force of nature defy your attempt to tower over her.
You may not defy her. No one ever will.
Bury your hand under the dirt. The deep dark wetness. The delicious fecundity of the mulched eternity.
What is under her?
Everything.
Worms wind their way through cyclopean tunnels. They twist between roots, hugging their length, ingesting the nutritious slop the degradation creates.
Ants make their way through warrens complex and fierce, tending to their home in the midnight dreary, living each day in the pursuit of food and life and death.
One day, you will die. Your body will be buried underneath this monster. Your body will be threaded in by roots and tunnels and ants and moles. You will be broken apart by this being, by this force.
To defy their influence on your life now is the height of folly.
That is the Tree.