“No force, however great
Can stretch a cord, however fine
Into a horizontal line
Which is absolutely straight”

No two trees are alike - nor bushes, as well. There’s an exercise in the workbook of “A Course In Miracles” where one stops and looks at things and says “I see only the past in this tree…I see only the past in this keyboard…I see only the past in this cloud”. It’s a way of realizing that I rarely ever actually look at anything without seeing all of the other things of that sort - filtering my perception of the thing through what I already know about other things like it.

One day, while running on a singletrack trail in Saguaro National Monument in Tucson, I stopped (standard runner reason and found myself looking at a creosote bush. It suddenly occurred to me that it was entirely possible that *no one had ever actually looked at this creosote bush the way that I was looking at it* - and it was fascinating. There seemed to be a light around the edges that celebrating the uniqueness of this one bush…

I’ve never seen an interior print like this. Very unusual. I can explain the star like points around the center. That is a common look where limbs grew from the tree all at the same distance from the ground. White Pines produce limbs that way. When one chain-saws through a log through the center of limbs, a pattern can be produced this way. The unusual appearance with this log involves the points not extending to the outside edge. This means the limbs must have been cut back flush with the trunk many years ago and the tree kept growing.

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

This comment was sent to me by Mike Mabe, http://www.pfafftown.blogspot.com, who owns and operates a saw mill in his spare time (so he knows trees).