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Some years back, when we were looking to rent a house, we drove across the South of England and came across this landscape. I don’t mind admitting that, at first glance, I couldn’t necessarily say what dazzled me. If I had been to choose a physical element it might have been colour of the sky, or the green tree itself, or the golden wheat field ready to be harvested, or all together. In truth, it was not so much what I saw but rather what I felt, the energy of the place, the freedom, the quietness, the serenity, and the peace that I felt in that place.
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For reasons I may not fully understand, for the next three years, I have returned dozens of times to the same place, sometimes with my camera, sometimes to see how the tree is doing, and sometimes just to clear my mind.
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While looking at the tree, I often remembered that as a child I have always been fascinated and did not quite understand how the tree knows when to sprout, when to leaf, when to prepare for winter, how it always chooses the perfect time, and how it always knows what to do without checking its diary, without being told, without looking at the news channels, without looking at the clock. How perfect a clock the tree must have?
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But there is no clock for there is no time, the cuckoo clock strikes only in my head and not in a hollow of the tree. Over the years I understood that the flowers and the trees have their own consciousness and still share an organized consciousness that perceives more than the sum of its parts, similar to the living parts of our body. Each cell and organ have its own awareness or consciousness and also a gestalt or collective consciousness, of which we, as individuals, are barely aware. Moreover, we, as entities as human beings, while we are individual, unique, and independent, are also part of the collective humankind consciousness which, in turn, possesses an identity.
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While everything that we experience has consciousness, even if each consciousness has its own awareness and independence, there is a massive cooperation between all these individual and collective consciousnesses and all of them are playing their part in the formation of the Earth as we know it. It is all about creation, a tree is a part of what we call creation, of what we call All That Is, it has knowledge, and it is connected to all the minds that keep the Earth in place.
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This is information that my brain has accepted, and while it remains in a way logical and can be explained by a logical mind, there is still something that overrules what is logical and what I have been taught about the world and nature and about who we as humans are.
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Even if I can somehow feel things, I cannot truly and deeply understand what is happening with animals, with trees, with everything that surrounds us and that is alive. I perceive matter that is, that I think it is, alive and matter that I perceive that is inert, and yet there is no such thing as inert matter since everything that is part of creation is alive, and every single thing is connected with the other even though I do not perceive it this way.
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The tree knows when to bloom as we know when the tree will bloom albeit we do not keep this into our awareness. The tree knows when the cycle is completed just as we know when our cycle is completed. We do not ask how a man, a human, knows when to die, and perhaps the answer is the same as to how the tree knows when to bloom.
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However, with all these perplexities and questions and the craving to understand and to expand my so-called "logical" knowledge it was the desire to feel the one that has brought me countless times around this tree for more than three years.
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Feeling the energy that we are part of and what we call oneness is rather difficult when we identify too much with the rigid form of a particular personality for our sensitivity to all that is around us is lessened by an intense focus on our personality and a particular point of view.
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Dissociating myself from the personality called Cristian, observing, and feeling, and understanding the feelings, and allowing the experiences to go deeper transgressing lows of logical mind has finally brought the easiness of enjoying every single moment spent in the company of this tree.
NOTES
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The series comprises 8 photographs
C-Type Printed on Fuji Crystal Professional Archive Maxima Paper
Matt Coating · Weight 245 gsm
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