TREE

Across the knotted seams of time, stitched through the patchwork of forgotten scriptures and mythic ash, one image claws its way to the surface with persistent serenity: the tree. Not merely wood and leaf, but the skeleton key to existence, veiled beneath bark and root. They call it many things – Tree of Life, cosmic spine, sacred silhouette, Gary, probably, but each alias merely bows to the same truth: the tree stands, and we kneel.

In Norse whispers, Yggdrasil does not grow, it binds. It stitches gods and monsters and mortals with the same indifference a butcher has for thread. Odin hangs himself from its limbs not for salvation, but for runes, – knowledge, you see, is never gifted, – it is wrenched from the jaws of agony, torn from the shadows beneath bark. In Mesopotamian stone, a stylised tree flanked by winged obsessions stands as a mockery of divine order, an etching of kings pretending they too understand what branches whisper when no one’s listening.

The Hebrew myth offers twin temptations: knowledge and life. One denied, the other misplaced. Because what’s the point of Eden if paradise comes with a curfew? Revelation tries to fix it, offering leaves that heal nations, but only after the world burns. Kabbalists, not content with waiting, tore the tree apart and redrew it into sefirot, – a divine flowchart masquerading as mysticism. Islam shifts the language but keeps the shape, a Tree of Immortality lost to hunger, a Lote Tree standing where even angels dare not peek.

India? The Bodhi Tree. Enlightenment as arboreal as it gets, roots that outthink the soil. Hindu thought flips the whole thing upside-down, roots above, branches below, like the divine pulled the world inside out to make a point. The Kalpavṛkṣa? A tree that grants wishes. Convenient, if your wish is to be disappointed. Zoroastrians have their White Haoma, a sacred shrub guarded until we finally deserve it, which of course, we never do.

The Celts? Crann Bethadh – Tree of Life again. Always life, always just out of reach. The Maya? A ceiba, growing like a cosmic surveyor’s pole from hell to heaven. The Egyptians? Nut’s sycamore, offering snacks for the dead, because nothing says afterlife like a ghost fig. And in China, the Fusang and Jianmu trees mark the edges of the world, horizon-bound sentinels watching suns rise, tired of it.

I don’t really have a ‘point’ I’m making here, just that I find it kinda fascinating that everyone is obsessed with trees.

Perhaps the tree persists not because it is sacred, but because it is accurate. It is the only shape that mirrors how everything actually works – knowledge, life, time, memory, death. Or perhaps, as the stories become lost, and gods become irrelevant, and as people too, come and go, one consistent anchor always remains, here before you, here long after you’ve gone, strong, old, and wise… the tree.

Although admittedly, that would require such an ambivalent allegiance to their own aspiration, the associated ambiguous anchor would be as alluring as an abstract armchair.

And yes, today’s episode is brought to you by the letter “A”