Meet the oak tree that owns itself. In 1832, it was emancipated and given land. Rise up, o leafy ones, and smash the tyranny of mammalian masters!
I don’t know what happened just then. Maybe I was channeling the magnolia outside my window—the one that was flowering so beautifully until it was suddenly winter again.
By the way, do you know Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree? Even as a child, it sickened me. I could see right through it. It’s like a manual on how to let people walk all over you. Feh. But who wants my opinion, anyway? Maybe you’d prefer those of a bunch of scholars (religious and otherwise). Hey, at least a couple of them are with me:
The fact is that Tree’s qualities would make her a terrible mother—a masochist who, quite predictably, has raised a sociopath. So The Giving Tree cannot be taken at face value as a story about human giving and receiving. It’s about taking, maiming, and killing, on one side, and passively submitting to such treatment on the other.
I do not aspire to stumpdom. Why not? Am I, then, ungiving? I would hate to think so. In fact, I think the “giving” in Silverstein’s story is suspect: it smacks of bad faith.