92

We may be compared to many things in many ways: to rivers, stately or rushing, filled with dangerous rapids;  to birds, soaring or flitting, maybe raptors;  to apples. delicious or crabby. (Actually, if you want to take the time, almost anything may be compared to almost  anything.) But one useful comparison for us is to compare people to trees. Our body is the trunk of the tree. The trunk holds up the branches and leaves, a canopy of actions and achievements. The mind, a system of roots out of sight, draws water and nutrients from our culture to support the trunk and canopy. Our Tree: roots, trunk, canopy.

That root system is all the thoughts, the learning, the memories—remembered or forgotten—that comprise our “Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea” as Samuel Beckett put it. (To necessarily digress, those roots are both brain and mind and those two are different things. See  # 9, Mind.)

Some of those roots become thick and strong: family, friends, colleagues, certain experiences, always shaping our perspectives. Others come and go; a past job, former neighbors, classmates, etc. And there are many we never recognize, an experience or a thought long forgotten, but still an unrecognized influence.

Freud thought there was one big, overwhelming root that dominated brain and mind. There are some who think maybe Freud had some things a little out of proportion, but there is no doubt that his root is a big influence in just about everybody.

Whatever the case, our roots, big stabilizing roots to tiny imperceptible threads, draw out our lives from our surrounding culture, past and present. We are living Trees, ‘growing and bending in the wind.'