Things that have evolved for thousands of years are worth spending time to study and learn as they provide wisdom beyond our understanding and the wealth of knowledge locked in their memories
🧐 Why I am reading this book
It was recommended on a podcast
It was a fiction book in an area that I usually never explore, there are some drama and character development but how it was meshed together into the grand picture is very novel
🙊 Great quotes
But this is America, where men and trees take the most surprising outings.
The tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food - the most harvested tree in the country - is vanishing
You live between three trees. One is behind you. The Lote - the tree of life for your Persian ancestors. The tree at the boundary of the seventh heaven, that non may pass.
Another tree stands in front of you - Fusang. A magical mulberry tree far to the east, there they keep the elixir of life.
The third tree is all around you: Now. And like Now itself, if will follow wherever you go.
He finds the word in a book: A tree is a passage between earth and sky.
Adam doesn't get people. They say things to hide what they mean. They run after pointless trinkets. He keeps his head down and keeps counting.
They say it's because he has no bibliography. A bibliography is a required part of the formal report. Adam knows the real reason. They think he stole. They can't believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.
They say the opposite of what they mean, to test if you can see through them. Which they want. They resent when you do.
Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn't make it any less kind. Perhaps unlooked-for kindness along the way might yet shorten the path ahead.
==You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It's like I had the word "book", and you put one in my hands. I had the word "game", and you taught me how to play. I had the word "life", and then you came along and said "Oh! You mean this."==
It's a great idea, trees. So great that evolution keeps inventing it, again and again
He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language.
There's no other explanation: almost all of the tree's mass come from the very air. Her father knew this. Now she does, too.
Well, she has always scared people. Angry people who hated wildness took away her career. Frightened people mocked her for saying that trees send messages to each other. She forgives them all. It's nothing. What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder. And then people will do what four billion years have shaped them to do: stop and see just what it is they're seeing.
==Improve forest health. As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come cure them.==
Science in the service of willful blindness: How could so many smart people have missed the obvious? A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones.
It would surprise Olivia Vandergriff to learn: every apple with a name goes back to the same tree. Jonathan, McIntosh, Empire: lucky rolls in Malus's Monte Carlo game.
Always. Cold is good for you. People keep themselves way too warm.
The section on diagnosing schizophrenia contains this sentence: Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are keeping with societal norms.
Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament. We might well call these ancient benefactors giving trees.
But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now.
It's the science of replacing an entire human life with its cash value.
And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.
There are trees that flower and fruit directly from the trunk. Bizarre kapoks forty feet around with branches that run from spiky to shiny to smooth, all from the same trunk. Myrtles scattered throughout the forest that all flower on a single day. Bertholletia that grow piñata cannonballs filled with nuts. Trees that make rain, that tell time, that predict the weather. Seeds in obscene shapes and colors. Pods like daggers and scimitars.
Yesterday they counted 213 distinct species of tree in a little over four hectares, each one a product of the Earth thinking aloud.
She has told him about the Judean date palm seed, two thousand years old, found in Herod the Great’s palace on Masada—a date pit from a tree that Jesus himself might have sampled, the kind of tree Muhammad said was made of the same stuff as Adam. It germinated, a few years ago. She tells him about the campion seeds, buried yards under the Siberian permafrost. Growing, after thirty thousand years.
Myths are old miscalculations, the guesses of children long ago put to bed. Myths aren't part of the foundation's charter.
On Sundays when the sun goes down I don't want to live.
A great, spoked, wild, woven-together place beyond replacing. One you didn't even know was yours to lose. Where did it go? Into making us. But it still wants something.
They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.
Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.
==Tachigali's once-in-a-lifetime offspring germinate right away, in the shadow of giants who have the sun locked up. They're doomed, unless an old tree falls. The dying mother opens a hole in the canopy, and its rotting trunk enriches the soil for new seedlings. Call it the ultimate parental sacrifice. The common name of Tachigali versicolor is the suicide tree.==
he has felt grief before - that awful mix of hopes crushed and rising - but always for kin, colleagues, friends. It makes no sense, this grief for a place he won't live long enough to see.
She needs her sisters, but she can't reach them. A call would be worthless. Even traveling to see them would do nothing. Mimi needs them as little girls, dangling their feet from the branches of a nonexistent tree.
The Greeks had a word, xenia - guest friendship - a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be a God.
Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees - an oak and a linden - huge and gracious and intertwined.
==In fact, he read once, back in Iowa, the night the woman came to trouble him into life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.==