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Labor Day in the Woods

8/29/2020 6:52:11 PM

Northwest Red Cedar 

Labor Day in the Woods 

  A few days ago, I went to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington to explore old growth Cedar trees for a picture I was painting. It seemed like a perfect way to celebrate the last days of summer and acknowledge the coming of Labor Day, a holiday that reminds us that the weather will start to cool and rains will come to drench the Northwest. As soon as I started up the trail, my mind was transported back to a time when the entire coastal region looked like the forest I was in. My imagination went wild with the thought that people once lived and labored in the woods I traversed.

  It had been many years since I walked past trees as old as 1,500 years and I was overcome by earthy, woodsy smells that somehow felt warm and reassuring. I gazed at sphagnum moss hanging from limbs and the variety of green mosses blanketing lower trunks and roots. I felt good knowing that mosses harbor cynobacteria that convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form that can be used by other plants.

  Gifford Pinchot is one of the oldest national forests in the United States. Its 1.32 million acres include 198,000 acres of old growth pockets along the western slopes of the Cascade range between Mount Rainier and the Columbia River. Dense wooded areas benefit from a abundance of rainfall and a network of streams fed from glaciers on Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Adams.

  Coastal natives were fortunate to live a place that served their needs so well. Tribal members labored together and didn't have to travel far to acquire the food and materials for shelter needed. Washington tribes were wealthy in comparison to other Native American communities. With natural bounty around them, they became successful traders who traveled up and down the coast bartering their wares. During the winter months they had time to relax and develop their artistic culture Artisans were employed to carve totem poles and make masks for story tellers to use by the fire in front of mesmerized children. Women worked on beaded moccasins, wove baskets and made festival garments.

Eagle Mask                                                    Yakama Husband and Wife (1908)

Together they built communal houses made from thick cedar planks as long as 100 feet. It must have been difficult to fell massive trees and split them into planks using beaver teeth and stone axes. Healers harvested medicinal plants. Women and children collected berries and tubers while men hunted elk and deer and fished in well stocked streams. The woods were full of species we now consider endangered. Natives heard the calls of spotted owls. They trapped beaver and easily caught  coho and steelhead salmon for smoking in preparation for winter.

  Foragers split the inner bark of Cedar trees into fine lacings and ties and wove them to make storage bags, baskets, finely twined mats and rain capes. Some were woven into hats decorated with a red dye made from the tree's shavings. Twigs were boiled and sprinkled on hot stones or brewed into tea to relieve symptoms of Rheumatism. Large trees were hollowed to make canoes that could hold up to fifty people. They were strong enough to travel the length of the Columbia River and withstand battering waves of the ocean. The labor they performed was in harmony with the land.

  In 1855, the Klikitat, Palus, Wallawalla, Wanapam, Wenatchi, Wishram, and Yakama peoples signed a treaty that gave up ancestral lands that amounted to one quarter of the state of Washington. The Confederated Tribes agreed to live with the Bands of the Yakama Nation on a reservation with off-reservation resource rights. In 1916, the treaty was broken when the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that hunting and fishing off-reservation had to be done in accordance to state fish and game laws. It was no longer possible for Native people to live as they did generations earlier.

  The reservation in eastern Washington is barely able to sustain itself. Its economy does not function well with timber sales down and unemployment at 73 percent. Tribal members live in extreme poverty. Health care and housing are inadequate, schools are failing with a high drop out rate, and the family unit is often non-existent. The women are twice as likely to be abused as the average Washington female and teens are more likely to commit suicide or die a violent death. COVID-19 has hit the Yakama Nation exceptionally hard, forcing them to postpone community gatherings.

As we approach Labor Day, I feel sad that we turned a proud people with a rich heritage into a shell of what they once were. Labor Day was started in 1882 to protest deplorable working conditions. The communal way of life that the Yakama Tribes thrived under is no more. Their working conditions are shattered and they are no longer able to sustain themselves. It is difficult to celebrate labor when it has to endure such a dire situation. As we recognize the importance of the men and women labor for their living, and hear the concerns of American workers, let's not forget the people on reservations who need their lives to be made right.

References:

Maxfield, D. (2016) 9 Revealing Stats that Show the Breakdown of Yakama society. Sacred Road Store. retrieved from https://sacredroadstore.com/9-revealing-stats-that-show-the-breakdown-of-yakama-indian-society/The

  Yakama Tribal Council. (2018 )Proposal for an AmeriCorps program. retrieved from https://www.nationalservice.gov/sites/default/files/grants/17TN195273_424.pdf

  Sager, J. (2020) 10 Fascinating Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the History of Labor Day and the Labor Movement. retrieved from  https://parade.com/1081089/jessicasager/labor-day-history/

Do share your thoughts below. 

Don't Fence Me In

8/22/2020 9:21:32 PM

Eastern Oregon Contemplative

Oh give me land lots of land under starry skies above

   Don’t fence me in

   Let me ride through the wide open country that I love

   Don’t fence me in

Let me be by myself in the evening breeze

   Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees 

  Send me off to forever but I ask you please,

Don’t fence me in.

I grew up listening to Gene Autry and Roy Rogers sing “Don’t Fence Me In.”The song was written in 1934 by Cole Porter with lyrics from a poem by Robert Fletcher. It was in the repertoire of many artists including Bing Crosby and Willy Nelson. There's a yearning in the words, a desire to be left alone to travel with your thoughts. The song is a sad reminder of a bygone era, for there's hardly a place in the country that isn’t bounded by fences.  

  In a push to keep foreigners out, 700 miles of a proposed 1,933 mile fence have been erected on our southern border. Fences crisscross vast areas of fertile prairie lands, high deserts, and the treeless plains.In cities fences isolate people in gated communities to keep undesirables off of private property. Those with money build houses in walled wealthy ghetto areas far away from those living in minority and poor ghetto slums. They purchase ranches in Montana that they enclose with barbed wire fences. The wide open spaces are sprinkled with no trespassing signs and guarded by armed owners.

  In poorer neighborhoods, gangs form invisible fences around housing projects and city blocks. Graffiti, a type of no trespassing sign, marks dominance over territory or turf and advertises power. The markings make everyone who live in the neighborhood vulnerable to drive-by shootings by rival gangs.  Rich and poor alike, find ways to segregate themselves within boundaries that keep “others” away and reduce their right to roam freely. 

  Though most Americans were taught otherwise, pre-Columbian Americans did own property. They were primarily farmers, not hunter-gators as was often depicted, with property owned by households, temples or urban nobles. Forests and deserts belonging to an individual or community were regulated common areas where local people could gather wood, berries and game. Iroquois and Algonquian women commonly owned maize fields that many people farmed, collectively distributing the harvest.

          Cambridge Commons in 1808 with Harvard College on the left and Christ Church on the right.

Native and colonial clashes occurred when colonists allowed livestock to roam freely and disrupt forest ecosystems that had provided food for Native peoples for generations. In the West, singing cowboys pushed herds of cattle across the land and homesteading farmers destroyed Native hunting, agricultural, and foraging grounds.

Over 50 million buffalo roamed from Mexico to Saskatchewan until the Army promoted hunting them to provide jobs for Civil War veterans, to supply meat for railroad workers, to make it easier to raise cattle, and to eliminate food and material sources for the Indians. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries fenced in family farms and cattle ranches had taken over the plains. 

 American citizens were told that Indians didn't have rights to land because they lived nomadically and didn't own property or have property rights. This falsehood was spread by John Locke and years later endorsed in novels by Ayn Rand and displayed in biased Hollywood movies that focused on the plains Indians whose complex economic and social rules centered on the horse culture.

  The Pueblo Indians practiced agriculture and were never nomadic so their households possessed land and owned homes. The Iroquois rotated living quarters among several locations considered best for farming and hunting. Communal property was often possessed by a group or tribe. When it was sold, the chief negotiated rights to the soil.

John Locke's writings were heeded when he asserted that ownership of land could be obtained by one of three methods;

1.  Homesteading it via fencing it in, protecting it, and proclaiming that it is under    your ownership.
2.  Acquiring the property title via voluntary transfer.
3.  Claiming abandoned land by adverse possession: move on it, fence it, mix one's labor with it, etc.

  Adding labor to a parcel of land was all it took to make it yours. Indians had no claims to property because they didn't improve their land by planting trees or fencing it in to limit its use and preserve value for its owners to sell in the future.

  As land use laws in the late 1800s privatized the country amidst those who pushed back to keep some areas available for common use. The National Park Service was started in 1872 when it established Yellowstone National Park in Montana as a "public park or pleasuring - ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." Since then, additional parks and monuments were carved from federal lands, mostly in the West. Today, there are over four hundred parks covering 84 million acres in 50 states and territories. Sadly, these parks are not wide open spaces where we are allowed to roam freely. There is a fee to pay and rules to obey that are set by the Department of the Interior.

  Though 331 million people visit the national parks annually, many Americans oppose the idea of preserving public land. Since taking office, President Trump opened up 2 million acres for mining inside national monuments. Last week he finalized plans to open up part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas development, overturning six decades of protections for the largest remaining stretch of wilderness in the country.

  To get away from fenced-in properties, gated communities, ghetto areas, and middle class neighborhoods visitors have to make appointments to camp in parks where they are instructed to stay on designated trails when they get there. Though cowboys still sing with gusto about wide open spaces where they're not fenced in, their yearnings are not heeded.

 References:

Gershon, Livia, (2019) Yes, Americans Owned Land Before Columbus. JSTOR, Business & Economics. retrieved from https://daily.jstor.org/yes-americans-owned-land-before-columbus/u

McMaken,R (2017) Did the Indians Understand the Concept of Private Property?  Mises Institute. retrieved from https://mises.org/wire/did-indians-understand-concept-private-property

Quick History of the National Park Service. National Park Service web site. retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/articles/quick-nps-history.htm

Prentice-Dunn, J. (2018) President Trump opens 2 million acres inside national monuments to mining. Westwise. retrieved from https://medium.com/westwise/president-trump-opens-2-million-acres-inside-national-monuments-to-mining-771917557aa4

Plumer,B & Fountain,H. (2020 ) Trump administration Finalizes Plan to Open Arctic Refuge to drilling. New York TImes. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/climate/alaska-oil-drilling-anwr.html

Works of Art are always for sale. Eastern Oregon Contemplative / Acrylic on Canvas/ Gold Frame/ 21” by 25” / $ 389

Bunnell,D (2015) Buffalo Holocaust. M. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@davbunnell/once-there-were-50-to-100-million-buffalo-they-were-the-most-numerous-large-mammals-to-ever-exist-e01a5bca9ed8

Thoughts of a Rock Wall

8/14/2020 6:17:03 PM

Rock Creek Awakens 

Walks in my neighborhood take me past walls that made me think about the way we construct our lives. I spoke to a few home owners who confirmed my suspicion that walls mimic the way their owners think, and though my study is flawed since my sample is small, there may be some truth to what I saw. I was reminded that we spend years assembling life's puzzle in order to stand firm and strong. The pieces we pick up vary in size, some hard with jagged edges while others are soft and smooth. They often are intertwined and have to be pulled apart before being fitted into the puzzle. This is done in accord with the way our brains work.

As toddlers, we ascend steps to quarries filled with solid pieces that were shaped through the ages. Our parents hold our hands until we are old enough to carry a load and assemble the pieces on our own. At first we step cautiously, not sure of what we will find or if we will be able to grasp and hold on to the irregular forms. We're attracted to white marble that sits on top reflecting sunlight but notice vulcanized lava hiding below in dark, dreary crevices. It makes us afraid. We want to dig it out and throw it away.

When older, we are anxious, yet excited to go by ourselves to gather the pieces needed for our puzzle. We start by following the path our parents set out for us, but when the time is right we start to think on our own and begin to gather, shape and build the wall as we want it to be. Some of us cut the pieces in squares and rectangles, making neat edges so they can  easily be piled on top of one another and arranged in rigid formations. Those a bit more venturesome try circles.

  No matter, for the way we think leads us to set each shape, size and color in a designated place that follows lists, goals, and maps we laid out in advance. As the puzzle comes  together we examine it carefully and see to details to make sure nothing is out of place. Odd shaped pieces are chiseled until they fit correctly—comfortably. 

When an unexpected piece suddenly appears to  disturb the layout, we are upset until we find a way to put the pattern in order again. We tie pieces together with mortar so they won’t stray. Their rigid structure makes us feel secure. It defines what is right and good and let’s us know how powerful we are, how perfect. We can stand atop its strong foundation. 

Then there are those of us who don’t think in straight lines, but explore many possible ways to put pieces together to build our walls. Though we see the big picture, to get  there we let our imagination go wild and select pieces randomly, allowing patterns to emerge. 

We view each heavy bolder and light pebble as unique, and look for unusual ways to join them together so they'll be sturdy enough to create a pleasing whole. Odd shaped holes are no bother for we know the puzzle will get filled in over time with the stones we trip over as we walk. They are gems to be collected so that when their wisdom is revealed they add meaning to our puzzle. 

  Some of us view what we do as organic for we blend hard objects of varying shapes and sizes and intermingle them with soft plowed earth and fragrant wild flowers. Though our divergent  method may appear chaotic, it fulfills the same goal as that held by linear thinkers. Our random approach creates a beauty that differs, is all. 

  Many of us use a hybrid approach to think outside-the-box. We combine a little of this and little of that. Our approach is indirect and creative, not immediately obvious and can’t be obtained by traditional step-by-step logic. By the time we finished our puzzle we’ve combined different shapes and sizes and made sure they fit tightly together.

The task of life is to put a puzzle together that gives us the strength to stand firm in the wind. Linear or convergent thinkers uses logic, rules and rationality to solve problems. They use a thought process that follows known cycles or step by step progression. A response is elicited before the next step is taken. Linear thinkers use a singular thought process leading toward completion while ignoring possibilities and alternatives. It is focused, sequential and methodical.

Divergent Thinkers generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. Their thoughts tend to be free flowing and spontaneous. After exploring alternative ideas, unexpected connections are drawn that are used to satisfy goals.

Lateral thinkers, first coined by Dr. Edward de Bono, solve problems by using both and indirect and creative approach. Their thoughts move between classic step-by-step problem solving and brainstorming. They use reasoning that is not immediately obvious and often pursue ideas that are not obtainable. Their desire is to think from a new perspective. Lateral thinkers start with a known idea with a goal of creating new ideas. To do so they look for possibilities and alternative ways of solving problems. There experience starts and stops as they go down dead end paths before trying another approach. When an idea does takes form it is usually plugged into linear plans.

The picture below is the wall in front of a 60 year old house that was occupied by several owners, three of whom added to the structure of the wall. It is interesting to surmise the way the three went about building their lives.

References:

  Teachthought Staff (2018) Three Modes of thinking: Lateral, Divergent & Convergent Thought. Teachthought. retrieved from https://www.teachthought.com/critical-thinking/3-modes-of-thought-divergent-convergent-thinking/

de Bono,E. . What is Lateral Thinking. Dr. Edward de Bono’s web site.  retrieved from https://www.edwddebono.com/lateral-thinking

Team ZipRecruiter(2017)  How Lateral Thinking Can Help Your Career. Columbus Dispatch. retrieved from https://www.dispatch.com/ZZ/news/20171117/how-lateral-thinking-can-help-your-career

Lluks, H. MD (2017)Vertical vs Lateral thinking in Healthcare. retrieved from https://www.howardluksmd.com/medical-social-media/vertical-vs-lateral-thinking-in-healthcare/

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Sorry but Rock Creek Awakens is sold. There are many more piece you might enjoy by perusing my web site. Contact me if you have questions at [email protected]

Trees

8/8/2020 1:10:57 PM

                Japanese Red Pine Tree                          Maple Tree  Bark

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

—From "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer

 TREES

There once was a woodsman who worked very hard but was never content. One day, a old hermit saw him in the woods and the two men got to talking. At the end of a pleasant hour, the wise man revealed that he had special powers and would grant the woodsman three wishes. He was told to call out “Raven, Raven, Raven” and he would come to grant his wish. The woodsman thought for a moment and said, “I want a wish now. I am lonely and would like a wife to share my bed and keep me warm  at night.”  

  That evening, on his way home from work he passed a maiden traveling in the same direction. She had long hair the color of a red pine tree that sparkled in the sun. They smiled at each other and fell instantly in love. The couple got married and before long they had five children, three boys and two girls. After the birth of their fifth child, the woodsman’s wife complained that they needed a larger house, one that reflected his improved station in life, for he had become a lumberman who wore a shirt and tie to work. 

  The woodsman remembered the hermit he met in his youth. It had been a long time since their last meeting but he called out to see if he was a man of his word. ”Raven, Raven, Raven,” he cried and the old man appeared in his office. “My wife complains that the roof over our head is too small,” the woodsman said. “I need a house that make her happy and impress my business partners.

  That evening when he returned from work, his wife gave him a smile as she did when they first met.  She stood in front of a large red door with a brass knocker the size of his forearm.  The white mega mansion before him had eight majestic columns that supported a porch with rocking chairs and a rocking horse for their youngest child. Inside were five bedrooms and a dining room table made of the finest mahogany that was large enough to accommodate his family and friends. The woodsman and his wife were content watching their children grow, marry, and have children of their own.

  One day, the woodsman looked in the mirror and saw wrinkles and hair that was grey. He \went to the office but could only work a few hours before  his back started hurting. It wouldn’t be long before he died, he thought.  He started to brood, drank too much, and complained about the unfairness of life to all who would listen. Sitting alone in his rocker one day, he remembered he had one more wish he could ask of the hermit. “Raven, Raven, Raven,” he shouted in a grumpy, demanding voice. 

The old man appeared at once. "What do you want now?" he asked annoyed. "You have a loving wife, a mansion to come home to, five children who gave you grandchildren to bounce on your knee, and gold bars in your vault for retirement. What more could you need?"

  “Use your magic to make me live as long as any living thing on earth so I can  watch life pass through the ages,”  he said.

  In the blink of an eye, the hermit disappeared and the woodsman was turned into a 2,500 year old sequoia tree. He stood majestically by a trail in a western forest overhearing young lovers pass by and enjoying the feel of wind as it rustled its limbs. “I am the oldest and wisest tree alive in these woods,” he said to his neighbors. “I know all that is happening and watch people come and go as the years pass.”

  Then, one day, a lumberman came by and saw the tree standing so taller than any tree in the woods. “Let’s cut it down, he said to his partner. We’ll make a lot of money and have firewood left over to bring home to our wives.”  And so they did.

 __________

  I love trees. Many of my walks are at the arboretum where I’m especially aware of the shape and feel of the bark of various species.  On narrow trails, it is difficult to look up at the crown of a tree without tripping on a root as I walk, so my eyes stay closer to earth. When I look around it is at head level where I take note of the trees’ bark.  I am surprised at how soft and spongy California Redwoods and Giant Sequoias feel to the touch as compared to native Douglas Fir trees. Some of the bark is dark with deep furrows like the lines that gouge an old person’s face while other bark is lined with long textured. 

  Do you remember studying trees in biology class? It’s good to remember how these beautiful organisms cool the earth with their shade and release oxygen so we can breathe. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and the heat-trapping greenhouses gasses human activities emit.  But, recent research shows that trees also communicate with each other. I wonder what they say as I walk by.

  Best selling author and forester, Peter Wohlleben, in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, was revolutionary when he wrote that trees of the same species are communal and form alliances with trees of other species. Botanists call his discovery of an underground fungal network the “wood-wide web.” They share water and nutrients through networks and communicate information about drought, disease and insect attacks. Distress signals are dispatched through hairlike root tips that join together with microscopic fungal filaments they use to send chemical, hormonal and slow-pulsing electrical signals that scientists are just beginning to decipher. They also communicate through the air, using scent signals. 

  Trees alter their behavior when they receive distress messages. For instance, trees in Africa can make their leaves taste bad when giraffes start nibbling on nearby branches. Trees can loan one another sugars where there are deficits from seasonal changes which is particularly beneficial between deciduous and coniferous trees. Crackling sounds heard in the roots of some plants are inaudible to humans and have yet to be interpreted.

  When Wohlleben attended forestry school he was taught that trees needed to be thinned, that helicopter-spraying of pesticides and herbicides was essential, and that heavy machinery was the best logging equipment, even though it tears up soil and rips apart the mycorrhizae. He worked this way for more than 20 years until he visited a few privately managed forests in Germany, which were not thinned, sprayed or logged by machines. “The trees were so much bigger and more plentiful,” he observed. “Very few trees needed to be felled to make a handsome profit and it was done using horses to minimize the impact.”

  At the University of British Columbia in Vancourver Canada, Suzanne Simmard and her grad students study the sensitivity and interconnectedness of trees in the temperate rainforests of western North America.  They found that when a tree is cut, it sends electrical signals, analogous to pain, into its tissues. A group of scientists from Tel Aviv University also confirm that some plants emit a high-frequency distress sound when in environmental stress.  

  Simmard  also identified some trees as hub trees, or “mother trees.”  Mother trees are the largest trees in forests and act as central hubs for the network below-ground.  For young saplings trying to survive in a shaded part of the forest, the network is a lifeline. Mother trees support seedlings by injecting them with a sugary fungi.  They change their root structure to make room for baby trees. Simmard says that to have resilient forests in an era of rapid climate change, large trees need to be conserved for they form the heart of a forest’s communication network and are the lifeblood of the next generation.

  Forests compose over 30 percent of the world’s land area, but are disappearing at an alarming rate.  Between 1990 and 2016, 502,000 square miles were lost, an area larger than South Africa. Eighty percent of the Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests. Over 250,000 million people reside there and depend on trees for subsistence and income. 

  Countries that preserve forest ecosystems give conservationists a reason to hope. In addition to reducing carbon emissions and deforestation, billions of trees need to be planted across the globe and a sprinkling of nations are heeding their call.  The Billion tree Campaign is managed by the nonprofit Plant for the Planet Foundation. Tree planing  is the biggest and cheapest ways of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere to tackle the climate crisis. But, we need to start now because it will take 50 -100 years to reach its full effect of removing 200bn tonnes of carbon. Below is the ranking of the top 100 countries in terms of how many trees they’ve planted last year.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

--Greek Proverb

KNOW YOUR TREES

There are five parts to a tree;

   Crown The top of the tree is the crown, made up of the leaves and branches that come in many shapes and sizes. The crown has numerous jobs. It shades the roots, collects energy from the sun (photosynthesis), and keeps it cool by removing extra water

 Roots Trees have a lot of underground roots — the size of the root system is usually as big as the part of the tree above the ground. This is essential because the roots help support the tree so it won’t fall over, but its main job is to collect water and nutrients from the soil and to store them for times when there isn’t as much available.

Leaves Leaves, part of the crown of a tree, convert energy into food, which is mostly sugar.  They contain chlorophyll which gives leaves their green color. Chlorophyll is a critical biomolecule, used in photosynthesis which leaves use the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and water from the soil into sugar and oxygen. The tree’s food or sugar is either used or stored in the roots, trunk, and branches. The oxygen from this process is released back into the atmosphere.

Branches Branches serve as support to distribute the leaves efficiently for the type of tree and the environment. They are conduits for water and nutrients and store extra sugar.

  Trunk  The tree gets its shape and support from the trunk which holds up the crown. The trunk is the main transportation water and nutrients from the soil and sugar from the leaves. The bark, cambium, heartwood, phloem, and xylem are the five different layers that make up the trunk.

  Outer bark is a protective layer made up of dead cells, much like fingernails.  The inner bark, made of living cells, is mainly there to carry sap full of sugar from the leaves to the rest of the tree. The Cadmium is the layer of living cells inside the bark that makes new cells to allow the tree to grow wider each year.

  Sapwood (Xylem) is a network of living cells that bring water and nutrients up from the roots to the branches and leaves.  In the center of the trunk is the heartwood. It is dead sapwood and is the hardest part of the tree, giving it strength.  Pith, in the very center of the tree has tiny dark spot of spongy living cells that carry essential nutrients up through the pith. Since it is in the center it is protected from damage by insects, the wind or animals. 

References:

Folk tale is an adaptation of a story I heard years ago. 

Grand, R. (2018)  Do Trees Talk to Each Other?  Ask Smithsonian. retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/

Nunez, C. (2019) Deforestation. National Geographic. retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/deforestation/

Stanton, K. (2019) Which Countries are Planting the Most trees? UnitGuide. retrieved from https://www.uniguide.com/countries-planting-the-most-trees/

Carrington, D. (2019) Tree planting ‘has mind-blowing potential’ to tackle climate crisis. The Guardian. 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/04/planting-billions-trees-best-tackle-climate-crisis-scientists-canopy-emissions 

Kahn, S (2019) A Group of Scientists Suggest that plants Feel Pain. The Scientist. retrieved from https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/24473/20191218/a-group-of-scientists-suggest-that-plants-feel-pain.htm

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Art is always for sale. Contact me at [email protected]

Japanese Red Pine is a mixed media piece that includes tree bark. It’s base is acrylic on deep canvas / 20” by 16” / $325.

The Maple tree is acrylic on deep canvas / 20” by 16” / $325.