Heroes Not Zombies

“The trees made the past seem within reach in a way nothing else could: here were living things that had been planted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees that had been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we were gone. They changed the shape of time.”
Rebecca Solnit. Orwell’s Roses

What a great phrase….”they changed the shape of time”.

We tend to think of ourselves as being at some peak of evolution, but when it comes to longevity, we humans are surpassed by many other life forms…not least trees, some of which can live thousands of years, and many of which can live for several hundred. If we stop to think what was going on in the world over the many years since a tree was planted, or since its seed first sprouted, we get a totally different perspective on life. It’s a bit like the temporal equivalent of the “view from on high” – we stand back and see a much greater whole – and in so doing we situate ourselves differently. We experience the “change in the shape of time”