>>> Item number 23723 from WRITERS LOG9401B --- (213 records) ---- <<< Date: Sat, 8 Jan 1994 18:35:03 JST Reply-To: WRITERS Sender: WRITERS From: Mike Barker Subject: FAQ: A Living Tree [Please feel free to print and keep this, especially anyone new to the list. There is some helpful information. But before we get to the facts...] Do not adjust your terminal... you have entered... THE WRITERS ZONE! (please adjust your seatbelt now, the trip is about to begin!) A Living Tree Copyright 1994 Mike Barker As mists bubble and thicken, filling your email, if you are lucky and sick, you may be graced with glimpses, tantalizing, incomplete, and partially obscure, of the tree. Watch for it. It is an odd tree, multiple trunks thick, twisted, and vanishing into ancient pits of deception, and with branches, so many branches, all kinds and sorts, wrapped here, grafted there, working and jerking all the times and places anyone can dream of and some unimagined. Those branches are so varied, so laden, so bent, that you know at one glimpse they've come from too many places and times to account. There are thin ones, whipping in non-existent breezes, with light green slivers of leaves shivering, quivering, and dripping. Others thickly poke out, slow growth of decades, almost decadent with age, bearing huge palmate fronds, or waving careful five-pointed outlines, or slowly baring ragged feathery glories of autumn. Amongst the leaves, if you peek quite cautiously, and the wind teases just right, you may find strange fruits, huge berries, or sometimes popcorn! Go ahead and try that one, watch out for the thorns, but you might have, well it looks like, no I guess it isn't really the fruit of knowledge, just a tart little taste of unwilling extension of belief. Still, those fruits are varied, keep looking and you'll find. Under the tree, where the passerby walks, is a mulch of drying leaves, thick, absorbent, and rich. For those who may dig in that mulch, they may find poetic whimsies, long tangled tales, and deeper, still deeper, a rich bed of past soils, mixed and enriched with the lighter leaves of today. And up from that bed, through the roots and the branches, rises a potion quite heady and strong. That sap, driving up, into every branch, distills poisons and brews wines, sugars trunks, and slickens slides of such flowers as the tree sometimes shows. Here, in one nook somewhat sheltered, out of the furies, yet quivering to their stormy blasts, with some sunshine, some rain, and even some winds, cluster some branches with intertwined twigs. Their leaves have yet to drop to the littered mould below, or to flutter free on the wind startling walkers and chased by snapping dogs. Yet they let each other see some of the patterned smoothness, or the prickly edges, or even the ragged roughness of leaves battered and torn, and in that sharing there is shelter and comfort sometimes from the worst of the dry sunshine or the snap of the lightning. Where you are, reading this, one branch thrusts up strong. Lean back in the embrace of the tree, little bud, and shake a few leaves in the nook for us to see, to share the triumph of spring growth, the fullness of summer shades, the falling bittersweet red-gold frosts, or even the delicate chill traceries of winter. And enjoy the fruits, whether true taste of knowledge, sweet grapes of disbelief, or unknown wobbling globe of imaginary bursting joy. For the tree of the writers always has room for another bud. This one's on me! Don't let your leaves disappear in the dark! Stick some out in the sunshine and let us admire the dance of sunshine and shade on your writhing veins and tender green webs, the living words of the tree. Who knows, we might get a wood nymph to help you...