We all have our strange ways and peculiar tastes. While walking in the woods I am known to wander off the path and stare for a wee while at something that used to be. I mean something that used to be a tree.
That's right. I am fascinated by old tree stumps. Especially those that have been weathered and wintered for years, the elements carving and forming their strange architecture, often overlaid by lichen, moss and last autumn's leaves.
Take this one, which sits in a forest recently flattened by Storm Arwen. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see in its circular broken walls and jagged peaks an inspiration for one of those spectacular mythical ruins that made the film version of Lord of the Rings such a memorable experience.
That this too, used to be a tree, is a thought that I find strangely poignant, a feeling on the verge of mild melancholy of the kind that makes you smile, briefly. Perhaps a generation ago this tree was felled, its wood harvested and used. For what? Furniture, fencing, a house frame?
In any case once a tree is gone the roots become superfluous, no longer needed to pump nourishment and water up into this no longer gigantic living organism.
Slowly the stump begins to decay, and a process of slow formation takes place. The serendipitous play of wind and rain, sunshine and ice, bacteria and fungi, insects and moss and lichen may seem random, explicable only as the contingent activity of environmental forces. Nobody makes a tree stump – they just happen.
Or so it may seem. For myself, I've come to appreciate the biological statement that is a weathered and sculptured tree stump. Aesthetics comes into it too – I think there is beauty and form in these old remains of a tree.
During these two years (almost) of Covid restrictions and constraints, of life overshadowed by widespread social anxieties and recurring uncertainties, I have discovered the significance of paying attention to what is there, and what attracts me. That means taking time to ask what it is about a landscape, a tree, a flower, a cloud formation, and yes, a tree stump, that summons our attention and affection.
It may be that one strategy for dealing with Covid, or at least its impact on our social and mental health, is to look for beauty where we least think to find it, to form the habit of seeing beyond our own noses and beneath the surface of things.
That's what happened on yesterday's slow meandering through the woods. An unhurried walk was interrupted by sunlight on a tree stump, a summons to acknowledge the persistence of nature's creative impulse, in the midst of a decimated forest. As a person of faith I've learned to trust those interruptions, and to sense in them a nudge away from niggling negativity towards gratitude, appreciation, and a hopeful trust in God's creative and recreative activity in our world.
But to be clear – avoidance of negativity doesn't invalidate sadness, poignancy, that instinctively human, and humane sympathy, with a living world where nothing is forever, where things get broken, and we discover that part of our calling is to care, to repair and where possible, to heal.
And yet, there are glimpses of glory that surprise us, moments of epiphany when we truly see, interrupting summons to pay attention and love the world as it presents itself to us – often in something as easily missed as an ancient sunlit tree stump.
(The tapestry is an original of my own, based on a Hebrew script which means "Tikkun Olan – To Repair the World")
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