Does SIze Matter?

I was walking in the woods a while ago, and found myself admiring the stout oaks in their second century, and wondering what it is about - age, size, greatness of any kind, that moves people, that moves me? I could philosophize, quote the greats, point to the brilliantly exposed paradoxes of others, but then, there I go again. Greatness, grandness. There is the myth of wisdom from antiquity, the idea that what we don't know is something more than what we do, that what once was, was more true than what is, when all it is, is suspicion, and the passing on of experience from a rock to a feather, the belief in common that the extrusion of both is the paradox of sameness and difference, that the contrast, the conundrum, the magic born of them is a higher wisdom, or a grain of sand. I think perhaps that is what draws me to trees - the idea that they have watched over the history of my time, silently. And they 'know' stuff, that no one of us does, and so I know not what color their leaves were, and they needn't ever tell.

It's so easy for me to believe more in something I know less about, as easy as fingering facts to prove a point. What is a 'fact'? There are few not called into question. The Cartesian proof of my existence, that I write this all down, the so often and obvious, that is pointed out as bald wisdom, the mysteries hidden just out of sight on their grand pyres or in the depth of our hopeful or needing hearts, alluring, like any disappointment, never come to fruit.

There is magic in a story, the untold, the imagined lay and textures, colors all conjured by mere words, but only a faith in now is real, if also rare. At times I look at the trees and see them as a breathing slice of time, pulsing right there in their subtly substantial surroundings, and I know that they are my ancestors like the dirt in my yard, and I am moved, but stilled by what I know.

Those grand oaks live patiently, watching the young, often of others, rising up at their feet, and they wait to become the dirt at their own feet. When I compare that knowledge to the mire my mind finds itself slogging through for answers, I know how little I know, how small life is, how far off a path I would tend to go to experience a mystery, how difficult it is to face the simplest facts, how untrue it is to adopt a path not my own, how easily I might tend to assume a path, an understanding as foreign to me as space, some other's tradition, and I'm no better for convincing myself of a higher knowledge, in fact I've strayed further in so doing. How the vale has been cast ever heavier blotting out the time when I had nothing to do but exist inside the womb of the forests.

My achievements pale, my accounts fade, the exotic melds into the mundane, and the trees remain.