I am interested in trees. Interested in it’s apparent stillness, in their underground serenity. In its intimacy with the birds, insects and the horizon.
They have a elementar silence, consisting of air (clouds) and land, that speaks matter and body, dealing with the space and the empty. A tree is fulfilled itself and nothing else. Only aspires to be a tree: upright on behalf of air and sub-soil,around shape that rotates with the shadow around the sun.
Now imagine one morning near the forest. The trees come in through the window of the home and your steps take you to them. First definition of forest at dawn: an individual voice to achieve what is high, vertical.
On the upside: the trees. On the downside: the drops of water, the dew.
The trees have vocal cords, branches, leaves.
Birds learn to sing because they listen the trees; birds learn the silence also because they listen the trees.
I learned today that the wind are a kind of narcissistic invisible entity. He likes the trees because he like himselve. He likes to touch them as a necessary condition to hear himself. So the wind also learn to sing with the trees. He mimics the sound of branches and leaves (see himself in this organic mirror).
A good concert hall: the winter, the rain,the wind.
Trees are also liquid elements and may fall asleep to the sound of water.
I remain interested in the trees, because a tree is philosophy and poetry. Philosophy that becomes poetry and poetry that becomes philosophy. An expansive force without words and without gestures. They demonstrate the absolute irrational, a beauty that can be rough and beautiful at the same time and especially because they give us the illusion that time can stop.
A tree is'a body which inhabits the memory because memory is' something that occupies the space. No one has doubts about the space of a tree, even if fallen on the ground.
In Portugal, when I was a child, I loved to climb up the trees. It was a huge challenge. First one branch,then another, only to look down when I was in a safe place.
Sometimes I reached the top, my head crossed the crown of the tree and it was a magnificent sight. I could do it in a forest or in the garden close to home. When we climbed the tree in a garden, was in conjunction with two or three friends. Each one chose a site (branch) comfortable, and we could be there hours, contemplating the world from above, in complete anonymity, feeling invisible. We were on top of the tree, but it was as if we were inside, very close to your inner peace.
Some time ago, I met a strange man in a village near Sopot, in Poland. He was in a park, sitting in a wheelchair, he had plenty of plastic bags with clothes and food scraps. He seemed to contemplate the trees. I sat beside her and did the same. He started talking to me. He introduced himself first:
– Piotr, 65 years old, have no identity, and lived here for 11 years on the street, under a balcony of a friend. I did silence.
Then he asked me:

-did you like tree's?

I nodded with the head.

-then you will not believe what I saw some years ago...

(I know there's the tree and the idea of a tree. The tree in the forest and the tree within ourselves. The tree in the air. The tree as a ritual, season after season. The tree that whispers in the wind, the tree that sows joy).
He began to tell me:

-I was young. It's was evening , Almost night. I was in in the top of one big tree near theBaltic sea, watching the horizont. There was a ship returning from the sea, he was more and more near...
All the ship was made of wood and It was nobody inside. I Did not Know what happened but when i look again, the ship was already inside the forest. I kept looking and cannot believe what I saw: gradually the ship turned it self into trees, planted himself slowly one by one on the ground, their trunks still had scales of fish and salt water. I kept looking at him without saying a word.
He continued:

-I think the trees wanted to return home, they were tired of being ship.

He got up and went away. Never saw him again.
The trees sing into our dreams. They love the clouds and all that is' high, the sky, the mystery, the wonder.


Antonio Xavier