There’s no denying the appeal of dead trees: they look more human. Radically simplified, barkless, and highly individualistic, with a tendency to go off-kilter.
When a tree dies standing, it loses contact both with the sun and with the family-like underground web—it ceases to be a conduit and a node, and goes fully on its own for the first time since it was a seed. Except of course it doesn’t go anywhere. And it’s about to play host and feast for a teeming metropolis of fungal, microbial, invertebrate and even vertebrate life. (Yes, Virginia, there is life after death. Just not your life.)
leafless
taking my hat off
to the March sun
Woodrat photohaiku 