How many different ways can we see things? This image is of course of a tree that has fallen down and the tree is one that has a tree knot on it. However after a wee bit of contemplation one can begin to see spirit shapes in this lonely transitioning knot. How many can you see? A favorite passtime of many people is looking into the sky at the clouds and reading the shapes of the clouds, pointing out the various images that can be found in the shifting gaseous formations. It is our brains that detect these minute alterations of formations. We interpret them according to our own intrapersonal perceptions. One person may see one image or vision and another person may detect something altogether entirely different. Both may see something that is important to them or a shape that they recognize as meaningfull and both persons may be looking at the same shifting cloud or swinging tree or rock strata. It might be whatever is on your mind.
When I photographed this wooden knot on this fallen log, I saw the feathery head-dress of an Indina bonnet and the profile of a woman with her mouth open and tiny infant legs...just a strange combination of linear elements that are encompassed within this one know. On the other side of this knot the shape takes on the more obvious profile of a man wearing a feather head dress. So I look at one side as feminine and the other as masculine. Both are part of the same whole. The same psycho-social makeup of human beings. So does the earth bound tree absorb part of the humans buried body and turns it into a spirit inside the wood tree and informs of us the passage or of the changing of one element to the other as it does so. Or is this the strong spiritual power of the underwood trying to communicate with us using the tree as its vehicle of change?
All around me in the trees, the clouds, the flowers, and the rocks I see spiritual messages and the writings of the woods. Have you ever looked deeply into the linear structures of the branch networks as they lace and inter lock out in the woods. When I look at them I see writing. I like to think it is God writing to us and talking to us through linear graphics built from the products of nature and the elements. It is like reading a book written in my primary language. There are woods written in the trees and in the forest branches and on the rocks and in the sky...if we do not read them perhaps we are still only searching for pictures, nothing more.
If we believe nature is writing to us its eternal message perhaps we need to learn to read these writings and interpret them for others to understand.
