Innocence – Tree and Snow Teaching
The snow creates a world of innocence upon which experience is writ large as fresh as the day it was first born. There, the hops of a blackbird, there, the trot of a fox, here, the drips from a tree branch. The light catches moisture held on a tree trunk that gleams rich in black and varying shades of green. The snow reveals this unexpected beauty in a dance of sunlight and shadow.
We humans seek to label everything, to catalogue and categorise but what happened to truly witnessing and the ancient art of naming? Trees write upon the sky and upon the snow. They teach us about simply being in nature and letting our presence simply be… without imposition.
Sitting like trees, letting words arise from blank sheets of paper, the burnished heart moments of remembering.
As an artist I notice people will often say an art work 'looks like’ such and such a thing, as if they cannot encounter it fresh and cannot appreciate for itself. Yet there is always a child's first time seeing snow and the trees. Too often preconceived ideas and thoughts can get in the way. We can be fooled into thinking that there are no more ‘first times’. Yet that is an illusion. Every time we see snow it is a fresh fall of snow on a new day. The mood we are in, where we stand, the weather and countless other things bring a new experience. No one moment is ever the same as the next moment. No two snowflakes are the same. No trees grow exactly the same way. Each and every experience we have is ‘new’ and fresh.
As we welcome the New Year let us treat it like a field of untouched snow and be conscious that as we walk across it we can make patterns of beauty with our footsteps.
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