What is a tree? Is it the green shoot first breaking through the soil? Is it the sapling fighting to claim its space in the under story? Is it the mature oak, an explosion of red and yellow in the fall? Is the old, wizened grandfather, a shadow of its youth, crumpling under the weight of countless winters? Is it the fallen, giving new life to the forest floor?

Or is it all of these things?

It would seem to me that the tree my child climbs today is a 3-dimensional still-shot in a long film from acorn to ruinous age. It is also the paper, the guitar, the chair yet to be born from its wood. The tree is at once everything it ever was and ever will be. Its past and future inextricable from its present.