The Act of Symbolic Interpretation

Cottonwood Tree Bark

Black Walnut Bark

Birch Bark

One of the most peaceful ways I've found to spend my time is this: gazing at tree bark, mosses, ferns, trout--all sorts of living organisms--and seeing the ways that their growth has created patterns.  The funny thing, however, is that there's never any easily identifiable pattern.  Sure, you can use a dichotomous key to classify said organism, but is it really as simple as this?

Where does this address the beautiful patterns and textures I find myself feeling and seeing on a daily basis?  Observe:


Reading "The Sacred Tree" has helped me ease out of this quest for immediate pattern identification and take time instead to look at all things as being a part of one large pattern.  My conclusion on this matter is that the Sacred Tree is meant to stand as an infinite source of symbolic content.  All the patterns of nature are apparent in it, and since we are a part of that same nature, similar processes manifest themselves in us as humans.  The act of seeking out these similarities is both enlightening and a form of self-reflection, serving as a personalized fountain of wisdom to guide one's existence.

The values I claimed to hold dear in class were truth, self-awareness, accountability, responsibility, and flexibility.  But I don't view truth as an achievable value--only as a guiding force that is itself reliant on self-awareness, accountability, responsibility, and flexibility.  The values I gleaned from "The Sacred Tree" include duality (or, better yet, balance), reflection, momentary existence, change, symbolic interpretation, respect, and activeness.

Of these, I realized that I had not incorporated respect and balance into my chart of values.  I was sort of saddened by those omissions, but then I realized that, in language's infinite symbolic connectivity, I had still managed to touch upon them.  Respect is related to responsibility--it's simply projected responsibility.  It's an outward acknowledgment of carbon-based similarity and connectivity.  And balance is related to accountability.  Accountability stems from cognates of terms used to express calculation and reckoning.  It's like trying not to bounce any moral checks, maintaining a karmic bank "in the black".

As far as my integration of the "Sacred Tree's" values go, the seed of potential has been sown and through this form of secular spirituality, the power of the world lies not in some unknowable God, but in the act of interpreting the patterns that have come into existence naturally.  I will continue to feel the bark and see the moss.