I doubt I will ever lose interest in trees: neither in the category of being we call 'tree' & the attributes that give trees their treeness; nor in specific individual trees I encounter. Familiar yet exotic, trees inspire awe. They exist beyond our human scale with life spans up to 100 times our own, heights up to 60. And they hold a strange and alien intelligence, communicating through a foreign chemical language, alerting each other to various distinct dangers, signaling their own needs when in distress, and coming to another’s aid when receiving distress signals from another tree. Though we've lived among them since human time began, we struggle to know them.
And they are so individual. Some display a gravitas, a sense of wisdom or solemnity; others a quirkiness, something akin (dare I anthropomorphize) to a sense of humor. You can find virtually every posture exhibited across distinct trees: from dignified, to haughty, to feisty defiance, from sprightly, to weary resignation, to despair. Exuberant, or contemplative, or worried, or stubborn. (I regularly encounter mind-boggling examples of their tenacity in clinging to life against sometimes ludicrous odds.) And each tree is unique, as distinct as a snowflake, a fingerprint, as each one of us.
