It is a misconception to believe that the life of a tree is predominantly rooted in the ground. Rather, the life of a tree draws its substance from the air that surrounds it; that aerial dance of carbon dioxide in tango with sunlight initiates photosynthesis, generating carbon and oxygen that in concert with water yields biomass -- the basic constituent of all living organisms.

I believe there is a vast potential that dwells in the things we often do not understand, which are misconceived and possibly unknowable. I believe the first mystery is the existence of curiosity.

the first mystery, my love, is that of our existence is a mediation on resilience as a tenuous balance between yielding and resisting. I spent many hours hand-molding black alumnium foil against a large gnarly tree by Ithaca Falls; the harmonies of water cascading by soothed my nerves, and wafting through my nostrils, the various aromas spawning from the lifeforms both living and decayed within the water and surfing the surface of the waterbed while the Sun careened by indifferently across the skies. The birds each burst into serenades one after the other, as if some instinctual orchestration had been physiologically, telepathically, agreed upon. I had hoped that Touch might enable me to communicate with the tree – and in many ways it did. The Tactile is sometimes as potent as Silence; there is immense power in the choice to not utter anything, to reveal nothing. Like David Abram’s poignant reminder of the eros in the tactile, what we touch invariably touches us back, and in that singular moment of pure unity, the dissatisfaction we felt in the inadequacy that is the artifice of language is temporality lifted, so that we can feel part of something larger again – as it always should have been.

This piece is also an homage to knowledge; how time transforms it, how transformative it can be, and yet how tragically superficial it can still remain despite lifetimes of erudition. Ultimately, what can truly be known in the grand scheme of the Universe? Like this work, those who only see its surface may never grasp the depth from whence it came, but those who choose to spend time with it might discover behind it some hidden meaning, some source of nourishment that they knew not they had been deprived of.