Hello Friend,

This past week was the fifth anniversary of when I went to the Carolina Bay to check out the bald cypress I’d been photographing for about two years, only to find another tree had fallen into it on a recent storm. As this week’s photos show, I’ve still gone back to document the changes to the two trees. Though, as I continue to return to this cypress, I often wonder what these trees represent to me. I am fascinated by how one tree falls, and then falls apart, while the other tree continues to stand. Recently, two very different ideas came to me on how I might view this situation: one very pessimistic and one not so much.

Maybe a little context before I give my thoughts. Two weeks ago, I was visiting some of my siblings living in North Carolina. There are eight of us, and currently three live very close to each other in NC. And that weekend five of us were together to help celebrate the retirement of one of my sisters and her husband. (I hope you can follow the numbers.) We are a close family, and we try to get together often. In a family this size, there are always ups and downs: celebration and concerns – often at the same time. One night I had a very difficult time sleeping and woke up a lot thinking about the changes going on in my life and the lives of the rest of my family.

During the night, one set of thoughts continued to come up: Why do I continue to photograph? Why do I continue to return and photograph at this one park? And, why do I continue to return and photograph this one tree so much? The first is more then just that I like to do it. The second is more than just that it’s convenient. The third, ah the third, is what I thought most on that sleepless night…

The not so positive view:

Since I started photographing this tree in 2019, it has become a world unto itself to me. So, maybe this one cypress is a possible representation of the world – and I mean the Earth. As I keep hearing about global warming, and environmental changes both big and small, I wonder – like many – how the Earth will survive. But then I realize, the Earth is not in danger. The Earth will continue to spin, continue to have seasons, and continue to have life on it. Well, life of some sort. When people say “We need to save the Earth”, what they are really saying is, “We need to save the Earth so humanity can continue to live and thrive on it.” (And that other species continue to live and thrive as well.)

So, what if this one fallen tree represents humanity and its short and devastating impact on the world. Short when looking in planetary time. What is 5-plus years to a tree that could live a thousand years or more? Maybe not that dissimilar to humanity’s impact for the past 12,000 years – if I use the development of agriculture as the marker. Then, maybe this long-lived cypress represents the world. The “world” may suffer for a time.

But, as the one tree breaks up, crushes under its own weight, losses its root system and is reclaimed by nature, the cypress is relatively unchanged, and still there. We don’t need to “save the world”, the world will save itself, and we are just in its way. Is it possible nature give humanity a “self-destruct switch” as a way to destroy itself if the experiment did not work out? Soon after humanity breaks up under its own weight and is reclaimed by nature, will the world pick something else to let evolve and try again? Will the Earth recover what is hers and completely cover over our existence? Maybe leaving her changed, but not all that different from 100,000 years ago?

Yes, dark and pessimistic.

Or is the cypress humanity and the other tree represents all the struggles we go through that change us and cause us the be harmed, but we come ultimately through it? If I again use the marker of 12,000 years and the development of farming, how many catastrophes has the human race faced in that time? Those that nature hurled at us: plagues, famine, pestilence, extreme weather. And those that are human made: war, the rise and fall of countries and empires, the over exploitation of natural resources. Since we are all over the world, even when something major happens like a war or a hurricane, it’s still mostly effecting a small – in a global sense – population. As one country goes through turmoil and decline, another is stable and on the rise. As one place is hit with a drought, another is experiencing perfect weather. In the Bay, no other trees in the park were affected when one tree fell on this one cypress.

And humanity is amazingly intelligent and creative when it comes to overcoming adverse situations. Humanity wants to continue, because life finds a way. And even in the most dire of circumstances, people still fall in love, raise families and come together to help each other. When we are faced with “world wars” and “global pandemics”, we, as a species, find ways to get through them and grow and survive.

This is one of the reasons I am such a fan of science fiction. Even in dystopian futures, humanity finds a way to keep going. When a hostile universe throws one more catastrophe at us, we find a way to tap into those qualities that make us human – creativity, ingenuity, adaptability and hope to list just a few – and ultimately grow past the problem of the moment.

So, where do I stand on what these two trees might mean? What do I do when obstacles fall on me – smaller ones that I can shrug off and larger ones that crash my life more? Honestly, my first reaction is to swear and get upset, and sometimes I want to curl up in a ball in bed. My wife likes to call me a pessimist and “Mr. Doom & Gloom”, because I often bring up the worst-case scenarios and see more of the darkness. But I consider myself more of a realist. A person who sees what problems might arise, what are the “brutal facts” of the situation. We as humans can usually figure out a solution and overcome whatever has fallen on us.

Ultimately, I believe in the power of creativity and hope…