[Photo Journal/ A-Z Photo Story] T is for Trees

T is for Tuesday! Time for Frizztext’s A-Z Photo Story Challenge. Letter this week is T and I am sharing gorgeous tree photographs from the West Coast Park here in Singapore. I feel blessed that I am living in a country surrounded by greens and I have an entire year of summer to enjoy and savour. Of course, the humidity can be too much on occasion, but we learn to live with what we have and appreciate whatever beauty we can glean from it.

I have always been fascinated by trees. I often claim that I must be a dryad in a parallel universe. There is just something about the trees’ majesty, their immovable rootedness that seem so decisive, yet its branches reach out to the heavens and touch the skies. The greens comfort me. They remind me of things yet to come.

Trees at West Coast Park, Singapore

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them–
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.” 
― Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems

“Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch or you might simply get covered in sap and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors where it is harder to get a splinter.” 
― Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

“To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.” 
― Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.”

― Kahlil Gibran

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” ― Hermann Hesse

“I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass