To the untrained eye, the cookie [tree slice] is inscribed with what every school-child recognizes as annual rings in a tree stump. One ring is laid down for every year of growth, each one outside of the next so that the sapling years are in the centre and recent history just under the bark. You can count them up to know how old the tree was when its life was interrupted by someone with a saw.
To read that story I slide the cookie under my stereomicroscope, at low magnification. What seemed uniform is anything but. Some rings are clear and even like pine floorboards, others wavy and dark. Some as wide as a pencil eraser lie next to a series each year as narrow as a thread. Like the human autobiography, there are good times and bad, years when the rains did not come but the caterpillars did, and spans when all she had to do was stand in the sun and grow like the sky was calling.
I zoom in further and catch my breath at the beauty of the cells, lined up in continuous files linking young ones to their ancestors in an unbroken lineage. It is strangely moving, an intimate privilege to read a private diary after the death of the writer. This very cell is a word, a day in the life. Unlike the book I am reading, this story is not made of marks on a page which represent a life, the tree has written its story in the life of its own body.
Our drawing sessions are just five minutes long, so I trusted nobody would get bogged down in individual cells, but perhaps they could bear them in mind as they secreted ring after ring with their pencil tips. I'd described the movements of our pencils in our sketches as our class's analog to the work of tree roots. (Reading responses are leaves.)
Most students produced some version of concentric rings, some aware that almost no tree grows perfectly symmetrically. But two went in an unexpected direction: their tree rings were spirals. "To convey the continuity of life," one explained. Kimmerer had noted that The only punctuation comes with winter when the pen is laid down.
but the class nodded enthusiastically. For us one-pointed beings - no mass of meristems are working simultaneously for us, at least as conscious individuals - this use of a single line to generate space and evoke time made a lot of sense.
The image above is tree rings and a piece of sometimes spiral cake: Baumkuchen!
