“It is with us as with timber. Every knot and shake in a board reveals some disease or injury that overtook the log when it was growing. A gentleman named Jean Pigeon, who once built a frame house for me, put this in a nutshell. He said: `Everything which a tree she has experienced in the forest she takes with her into the house.' That is the law for us all, each in his or her own land.”
Rudyard Kipling , A
Book of Words XXXIV, Speech to Canadian Authors, Royal Society of
Literature. Visit of the Canadian Authors' Association: July 1935.
I love that Kipling included Pigeon’s gendered
French nouns: “with a tree she has experienced… she takes with
her into the house.” I also love the idea that I am like a board that
reveals disease and injury incurred while growing.
Tom Robbins once said that when people tell you to
shut up they mean stop talking; and when people tell you to grow up the mean
stop growing. The name of my blog is based on a premise that, like a tree, my
lifelong growth will stop only upon my death.
I may no longer have growth spurts like a young
sapling, and I may lean over a bit like the old eucalyptus at the top of the
driveway, but I’m still hanging out here in the forest trying to overcome
drought, pestilence and the other miscellaneous assorted slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune.
So, technically, even though the rate of my blogging
has slowed, this blog, she still grows.
2 comments:
Uh, isn't that eucalyptus leaning toward the house? Makes me nervous!
I never comment, but this blog? I love.
Post every day or every year- I'll be here.
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