Tree of Knowledge

On Sunday past, I was practising the Five Element Qi Gong with eyes half closed; mind half focused, half in trance.

Gazing out the window I saw a hand floating in the air, pointing towards a row of books girdled around the massive eucalypt tree in the back yard. There, as though painted with the poet’s brush of magical realism, the tree and books hovered silently, yet poignantly. Oddly enough, I didn’t bat an eyelash as it all made “sense”, appeared logical; was even ordinary.

I was witness to the quintessential Tree of Knowledge.

Slight-of-hand magician, David Abram, said this about the photo after I sent an email copy of it to him earlier in the week.

What a great shot. Indicating that what speaks to us, ultimately, secretly,
through all the books we read, are the living trees from which they are
made…

All knowledge, as the hand pointed out, and the books made reference to, emanates from tree. What has been written in and on books, came first from tree. Shakespeare wrote about “tongues in trees, sermons in stones, books in babbling brooks”. (Susceptible to alliteration, he misplaced books and tongues.)

Ultimately, Tree speaks for us (secretly, even, as David Abram writes). Tree works for us. Tree is us.

A magician works a spell to make something “impossible” happen. A magician works:

…to create an impossible experience, an experience that is so shot through with mystery that it startles people out of all of their preconceptions. When a magician is successful making a stone vanish, and then plucking it back into thin air, or making a coin float from one hand to the other hand, it leaves us without any framework of explanation. We are suddenly floating in that open space of direct sensory experience, actually encountering the world without preconceptions, even if just for a moment. The magician is one who frees the senses from the static holding patterns that are held in by assumptions, by outmoded ways of thinking, and by the styles of speech and discourse.

David Abram

For a moment, my preconceptions of what was reality were lifted to a different dimension. In this temporary space the physical union of hand, book and tree were presented as fact and I had no doubt that what I was seeing and comprehending was true.

Yes, the trance broke within seconds and I catapulted back into a western, scientific paradigm where what I had “really” seen was Sally’s hand and a row of books from the bookshelf reflected in the window. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Maybe no longer magical, but the magic of that brief moment definitely stayed with me.

And still does, even today, four days later. One reason is knowing that the etymology of the word “book” comes from “boka” —Germanic for beech tree; the wood of such tree being the material of the tablets on which runes were inscribed with marks having mysterious or magical powers attributed to them.

No matter how fleeting, there is always something within each day to bring wonder back into our lives.  Cast any runes lately?