Root of the Universe

My good friend Cate, knowing of my love for trees, told me about a special one she had discovered, blown over by the wind, exposing an intricate tangle of roots.  It has become, in a real sense, a spiritual mentor for her:

"For the last five years when walking that trail I've looked forward to seeing the root and the changes. It seems a little smaller than the first time I spotted it and it's lightened in color.  Interesting changes. What I first think of is- we get a little smaller as we age and lighter and more interesting (hopefully)." 

I went there today to see the tree and photograph it: Like Cate, I had a deep reaction to it on many levels.

The complex message it conveyed immediately brought to mind how Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher with a poetic sensibility, felt about trees. Like Carl Jung, he believed that all humankind, whatever our color or wherever we come from, hold a common set of archetypes in our collective unconscious.

One of the most powerful archetypes, we hold in common, is the tree. What follows is a condensed version of his reverie about trees – and their roots:

“A root is always a discovery. We dream it more than we see it… Images are primary psychic realities. In experience itself, everything begins with images. The root is the mysterious tree, it is the subterranean, inverted tree. 

For me, the tree is an integrating object. It is normally a work of art. Thus, when I managed to confer upon the tree’s aerial psychology the complementary concern with roots, a new life suffused the dreamer in me…The imagination then took possession of all the powers of plant life. To live like a tree! What growth! What depth! What uprightness! What truth! 

The imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and in the wind. The imagined tree becomes imperceptibly the cosmological tree, the tree that epitomizes a universe, that makes a universe …” 

–      these quotes from: Bachelard, Gaston. On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. Spring Publications, Inc.