Trees and Time

I encourage you to explore Alan Jacobs’s redesigned website, The Gospel of the Trees. As it says on the About page:

The Bible is a story about trees. It begins, or nearly enough, with two trees in a garden: the Tree of Life, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The pivotal event in the book comes when a man named Jesus is hanged on a tree. And the last chapter of the last book features a remade Jerusalem: “In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” If you understand the trees, you understand the story.

Start by clicking on the leaf icon in the upper right corner. From there, clicking “Explore” will take you to a random page, containing a photo, a poem, or a quote about trees, usually with some kind of spiritual dimension. The experience of going smoothly from an arresting image to an insightful thought is a little like walking through the woods with a clever, well-read friend at your side. In my few minutes clicking through, I saw photos of trees, part of Auden’s Hora Canonicae, the lyrics to “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree,” a passage from Deuteronomy, and an excerpt from a news article about the difficulty of arboreal classification — creating a family tree for trees, as it were.

I had something like this website in mind when I started my time Tumblr, The Escapement. Perhaps one day that, too, will be a beautiful “coffee-table website.”