Why Are You Like This? Asked the Pine

A tale of trees, shape and identity from the Yosemite National Park.

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Mid-August, Yosemite. I find myself somewhere between the stillness of subalpine air and the granite releasing the day’s warmth back into the sky. A few thousand feet above the valley floor, the air is resinous. Sunbaked Jeffrey Pine bark gives off vanilla-maple scent. I imagine a forest bakery which opens only in full sun.

Jeffrey and Ponderosa Pines split the ridgelines, often indistinguishable unless I stop and smell the bark. Lodgepoles dominate at higher elevations, skinny and tall like lines drawn in pencil their cones are sealed shut with resin that only melts open in fire. Bigleaf maples are native to the area and are often found near the Merced River. California Black Oaks are present, especially in the lower elevations.

I observe the trees. A Sugar Pine nearby leans. Its trunk curves around a glacial boulder and its cones, longer than my forearm, dangle like pendulums.

No two trees look the same. Even among a single species, form varies wildly: twisted, split, hunched…There is no average tree here. I am also not the average tree, I feel comfortable around them.

Not one of them asks why another stands taller, in reality. It´s a mosaic of life gracefully responding in real-time to possibility.

* What forces have curved your growth the way granite bends a trunk?

* Where do you find yourself leaning toward light?

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Paula