PEACE from TREES

Seven of 28

As trees to change our dimensional seeing as our living genuine being of love’s mixing and freeing as an ever-present and sincere kiss… As endless as mirrors of forever known by who we really are. As finite as atom to electron, massive as galaxies sharing light as seed to other galaxies, as Sahara once as forest, as northern boreal’s green once as frozen-barren, as earth’s primal thick ship timbers breaking away in storms, floats downriver out to sea.

A kiss… a view of ourselves as who we think we are. A kiss… a view of ourselves as we later learn we are… More than all other… a kiss as all living awareness that’s ever known us… As vortice-spiral ocean-wide all inclusive desires, even in our winds over ocean, our rich land’s ever smiling is easily shared…

As forest-flotsam-tuna-nursery thriving at sea under hundreds of miles of spiraling floating shade that’s now gone. As huge land rafts no longer mixing or blending, still overhead fierce winds travel seeds for miles of thousands… Still our roots migration is forever merging-returning learning of a way we always find you… a way our love’s blending is genuine, is sincere lips of a kiss… of a lasting affection that lives long after who we know we are has ceased.

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Poem and Photos by DeaneTR ©2007
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The poem above is inspired by the condensed news articles below. Learn more about the defense of earth’s trees at: http://olyecology.livejournal.com
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The original frogs that successfully colonized the Caribbean islands likely hitched a ride on floating mats of vegetation called flotsam, which is the method typically used by land animals to travel across salt water. "Some rafts of flotsam, if they are washed out of rivers during storms and caught in ocean currents, can be more than A MILE ACROSS and could include plants that trap fresh water and insect food for frogs," Hedges said. It is not likely that the frog species dispersed simply by swimming because frogs dry easily and are not very tolerant of salt water. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation's Biotic Surveys and Inventories Program, Systematic Biology Program, and Assembling the Tree of Life (AToL) Program. The latter program is an effort to understand the "tree of life," or the relationships among all organisms. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070606235308.htm

Celebrated in Buddhist temples and cultivated for its wood and cottony fibers, the kapok tree colonized Africa after the continents split when the trees' seeds traveled across the ocean. Oceanic dispersal links the world's rainforests, said University of Michigan evolutionary ecologist Christopher Dick. Dick studied the rainforest form of Ceiba pentandra, a species of kapok that grows taller than a 16-story building, its head poking above the forest canopy. Its flowers produce more than 50 gallons of nectar per tree, attracting bats that travel as far as 12 miles between trees and transfer pollen in the process. When the seed pods ripen, they break open to reveal fluffy fibers that are used to stuff pillows and mattresses. The seeds, which are about the size of a sunflower seed, are buoyant and able to float down rivers along which the colossal trees grow. Dick and colleagues investigated which of several possible scenarios could be the reason for the current distribution of Ceiba pentandra. Dick concluded that extreme long distance travel by wind or ocean currents explains how the trees spread from South America to Africa. "This study is one of the first to catch that process in action at the species level.” The findings, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), appear online this week in the journal Molecular Ecology. http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=108787&org=NSF&from=news

Most people probably know wood floats, but don’t know how far it floats. Yet trees, in the form of driftwood, are the ‘Wooden Mariners’ that were plying the Seven Seas long before the first human thought to take a ride on water. Borne on the floodwaters of rivers in near and distant lands, drifting trees, entrained in the currents of water and wind, travel the world’s oceans, as they have done for millennia. In the north Pacific, for example, drifting trees that escape the inshore tidal currents enter the open ocean, where they may eventually contact the North Pacific Gyre. Once captured by this huge, circulating vortex, large trees can remain afloat for long periods and cover great distances to come ashore in such exotic places as the Hawaiian Islands. Other drifting trees that land on the shores of the Hawaiian Islands are indigenous to the Philippines, Japan, and Malaysia. In olden times, the beached Douglas firs, western red cedars, and coast redwoods from the Pacific Northwest, of what today is the United States, were even integrated into the customs and rituals of the oceanic cultures. Ancient Hawaiians prized these huge trees because local chiefs preferred them for construction of their large, double canoes—once a symbol of wealth and power... http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/products/diary_samples_07.html (See: CHAPTER SIX: THE SEA - Driftwood and tuna) http://www.chrismaser.com/bk-fts.htm

PEACE from TREES