What to say about the Giant Sequoias we encountered at Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park? They're so big! And tall! Really old! And strange!
Jared Farmer somewhere observes that people claim profound spiritual experiences around them, sensing our smallness in the face of deep time and physical massiveness, but really our thinking just stops.
We can try analogies. I was quite taken by this pretty display of superlatives at the Giant Forest Museum, a hulking Giant Sequioa and dark towering Coast Redwood surrounded by (from left) the Tule Cypress in Oaxaca, the museum itself, a Space Shuttle launch, a stack of elephants, a Blue Whale, the Titanic, a wispy Bristlecone Pine, a tall Sugar Pine, the Statue of Liberty and an adorably diminutive dinosaur.
Each of these comparisons would permit some babbling, but in the end just deepen the sense of incommensurability between our thoughts and these remarkable existences. What could we have to say to each other?
The point when I came closest to some sense of the enormity of these trees was when my nephew climbed atop the massive rootplate of a fallen giant, which looked like a portal out of science fiction movie. To get up there he had to walk along the fallen tree to find a way to climb up, disappearing from earshot for such a long time we started to worry.
We can try analogies. I was quite taken by this pretty display of superlatives at the Giant Forest Museum, a hulking Giant Sequioa and dark towering Coast Redwood surrounded by (from left) the Tule Cypress in Oaxaca, the museum itself, a Space Shuttle launch, a stack of elephants, a Blue Whale, the Titanic, a wispy Bristlecone Pine, a tall Sugar Pine, the Statue of Liberty and an adorably diminutive dinosaur.
