Thou Illusion Agency

How high, stoic, and reaching art thou tree
How aged, resplendent, centered
Thou art in the ever-surround

How perfect you space yourself from the others
Shading what needs it
Possessing what others shan’t possess and so they cease

Your ponderous reach of spindled arm
An immovable base impervious To the blunt, the wind, the ablative, the shearing

How numerous and spritely your growing shoots
They are all of you and more of you
Expendable in parts but necessary in whole

You’ve developed as the one
Almighty, self-made, proud cell of plantness

Yet you laugh at me, you laugh at me
You laugh at the absurdity of these representations
You mock me with your supreme agency
You beckon me to see what there is
The trials, the traumas, the twists, the holes, the decrepit, the process

For what is a tree but a thing that originated from a supernumerate casting for opportunity
A representative of a greater wisdom
Not solely, but the whole of all tree-dom
Life-dom is closer to the wisdom I thirst for

How blind I am to the countless starvations, murders, thefts, woundings that
were part and parcel of your own blossoming
How it was that you lucked into the space
You landed in and innocently took root
For there was nothing for you or your siblings
At that emergent and mandatory moment

Your duty
To begin to root and emerge
Into the fate you landed upon
Thereunder

For the root of the light
Is the branch of the dark
You see little difference
Two nary disparate categories bring about the same
The substrate for growth

Not one without the other
Not one without the many
Not many without the not many
Some ultimate one
Is there?

My fallible intellect fails to see a tree that earned its way to its glorious position in the world
My naive intellect fails to see a tree that perhaps purposively chanced into its position
My deluded intellect fails to see a tree that neither chanced nor earned

All this bounded, narrow, tenuous mind saw was
A sequence of events brought about from a single pointed origin
O that imaginary point I love to make
The point that was only as real as it was in mind

O tree, thou art not what I say to thee
O tree, how thou never mocketh me for my inaneness
O tree, point me to the way thou hast gone and always have gone
O nature, how you demonstrate thine self.