Cross-Section

Barley, a dog, walks past a fallen tree those upper branches have been sectioned off to clear the path, revealing the tree rings beneath.

It’s funny how quickly the brain falls back into essentialist thinking. If I see a mossy log, my first instinct is to think of it as a feature of the environment, almost like a piece of furniture, and not as the horizontal afterlife of a once-living tree. Awareness that the features of the natural world all had to have somehow gotten to where they are, and that their position and character is transient on the scale of years or decades, is slippery, especially for someone as indoorsy as myself. I all-too-easily take today’s thin slice in time and extrapolate, assuming something superficial extends durably into the past and future. All of which is my long-winded way of trying to justify the dumb thought I had when I took this picture: “Huh! How weird that this log has rings!”