How do we honour the past without being consumed by it?

Each ring touches the knot as it passes. Each one moves on. The knot becomes one whorl among many. The wood alone knows which ring is the storm.

What is the wood grain metaphor?

When a branch breaks, the tree grows around it. Years later, the break is one ring among many – part of the pattern, part of the grain.

Remembrance

Mneme

"The wood alone knows which ring is the storm"

The Threshold

The branch the storm tore away is gone; the knot remains: a dark whorl where the grain refused. What broke off has no name.

Then: spring. Sap rises, meets the whorl. The grain bends. You have carried it too long to tell: did you grow around the wound, or through it?

The Way

You trace the rings until your finger stops. The year the wood tore. The grain has not run straight since.

The knot is still the branch. Its grain runs across yours. It will not yield.

So you grow. Neither towards the wound nor away.

Another ring, and another. Each touches the knot as it passes. Each moves on.

Come spring, a bird nests where the torn branch once was.

The knot becomes one whorl among many. The wood alone knows which ring is the storm.

The Shadow

The Seamless closes the bark over the tear and runs the grain straight across it. She turns the storm into a blemish so she need not grieve it. Inside, the rot she has shut in goes to work on the heartwood.

That was long ago, she says. The wood has closed.

One spring, a child carves initials into her bark. The blade slips clean through and meets only air. She grows on as if the child had found nothing, and each year the canopy weighs more on bark and air. The fall lays the hollow open to the sky.

In the cross-section: hollow where the heartwood should have borne the height. The knot sits at the centre. Every ring grew around it. None touched it.

❖

The Transparent sends all his sap to the knot. Year by year, his crown thins.

A traveller rested in his shade, praised the leaves, and left without seeing the knot. All those rings, unseen.

He learnt to lean – to turn towards every passer-by so that the break would be all they saw.

Once, it worked. A stranger stopped beneath him, looked up. There, he said, and stayed.

For one season, the grain uncurled.

The stranger took to the road again. The bend returned, deeper now for having known release.

Far down the road, someone is coming. He is already leaning.

The Cut

Which grief taught your grain to lie straight?

Reckoning

Wonder

REMEMBRANCE