Two Arborvitae

There are two young arborvitae in the black Iowa soil at forty-two degrees, twenty-six minutes, thirty-two point seven-four seconds north latitude; ninety-four degrees, fifty-six minutes, forty point three-zero seconds west longitude. There they stand at the edge of now-bare farmland ranging away by the hundreds of acres to the south. In this angulus terrarum, they are exposed to the open winds, sun and rain. They were placed into the soil there when they were three years old, have been in that spot for a year, and most likely have spread some roots about themselves. One of them exudes health, is a rich bluish-green, and has put on several inches of new growth. The other is a mixture of life and death, half the branches brown and desiccated, and half still blue-green. The tree is half alive and living, and half dead and dying.

All life on the planet is kindred by virtue of being life on the planet. It is a grave error of the human mind to find itself sui generis, superior to the rest, or somehow not as rooted in the biosphere of the earth as the arborvitae. That human beings think of themselves as divine is not only a grave error for all concerned, but it is absurd. Seeing is more than mere perception. Apprehension demands that language processes in the brain be bypassed. The senses feeding into a silent mind reveal to it truths common to all life on earth. Sense perception penetrates to real apprehension only when not thinking consciously and when not transiting the linguistic rendering processes of the brain. The linguistic rendering processes encode and decode that external reality, the world, the universe, and in so doing, create a coarse mental analog of them in the medium of Platonic shadows. In words, minds circle in Plato's shadowy cave, their figurative backs turned toward the world of the trees.

In the two arborvitae are mirrored the lives of many others, human and non-human alike. Manifest are vitality, circumstances, and fortune; internal and external harmony or conflict; degrees of life in death, and death in life. In the health of the one is cause for aesthetic appreciation and joy; in the conflicted struggle of the other cause for pity; in the minds of most, disdain for a matter from which no money is to be made and for which time is being lost.