Two Paths Diverged

     I am two paths diverged, but rather than the paths running wildly off to either side, they are meandering along side by side. What do I mean? More philosophic ramblings perhaps? No, but merely an observation I came up while walking in the woods today. Everything I chose to do seems to lead to the same place, and every time I choose something else the selected path seems more difficult and the path I passed by seems so much easier.

     I saw a tree that had been neatly cut down, and when my boyfriend counted the rings we discovered that it was in it's one hundred and fiftieth year of age. That tree was a sprout in the year 1861. A different world. For the first four years of that trees life, Abraham Lincoln was the president of the United States. It lived through the civil war, and the end of slavery. It saw the mass exodus of men to the Yukon for the gold rush, and survived the production of the first model T Ford. By the time the tree reached its seventieth birthday it had watched a world war, and the the beginning of the great depression, at at eighty another war that would ultimately change the face of the American economy. It breathed the air after the atom bomb was dropped and witnessed the addition of the final state, Hawaii, to the United States. The civil rights act, the fall of the twin towers, and nearly three years of the first African American President. An interesting juxtaposition since the first president the tree was alive to witness is hailed as the liberator of the slaves.

     Of course, the tree didn't know about all that. Still, it was something that had survived for so long I wondered what had caused it to be cut down now. The wood seemed to be in good condition, yet none had been harvested. It had been sawed in half, recently enough for only a little orange mold to have set in. Perhaps the tree had been dying for a long time, and some park ranger finally managed to set aside the time to come and saw it down before it fell over. Perhaps it was hit by lightening. But it will rot away, and be devoured by ants and termites, until it recreates the organic upper layer of the forest floor. Hard to feel sad when the cycle is so obviously spinning on as it was meant to.

     Things in a forest just happen on a scale so much slower than the span of a human life. This is the thing I find to be the most comforting of all.