Trees: Witnessing

From personal connections to cultural ones, contemporary times to ancient, religious beliefs to scientific charts, humans consistently utilize the tree form to characterize, illustrate, and understand ourselves. How and why do humans use trees to tell human stories? What about trees draws us to represent humanity through their form? I begin the odyssey of finding my personal answers to these questions from multiple perspectives. First, I examine my personal narratives and history with trees, discussing multigenerational trees and trees as an organizing structure. Then, I look at how humans represent ourselves with trees, looking to historical and contemporary examples of creative human representation through (and anthropomorphizing of) trees. Finally, I identify how trees act as living witnesses to our stories: human presence, love, violence, life, and death. While collaging my personal familial and intergenerational connections to trees with cultural, religious, contemporary, scientific and historical forms, I examine the persistent presence of trees in human stories and my own life. Trees are alive, living long lives that we make understandable on a human scale. As we watch them grow, they become markers of our lives; they serve as witnesses to our human memories, watching generations live and die. In an era of climate disaster, deforestation, and increasing urbanism, human relationships with trees are shifting faster than ever before. How are trees still relevant to our experiences? As we see our likeness in nature, do the trees meet our gaze?