The text below is a translation into English of something I wrote in Spanish last fall.
A single tree is never just one tree but a multitude of trees. Specially in the north, where seasons bring multiple violent changes. During the fall, a tree is a different tree from one week to the next, from one day to the next depending on the light and the colours of the sky, from one minute to the next depending of the wind. I come as often as I can to this park, and I see the trees change ceaselessly. A week ago, a group of almost naked and very tall trees, with just some yellow delicate leaves at the top, started moving back and forward pushed by a single wave of wind. There was enough silence to hear the air passing through the leaves, looking at the leaves moving softly against the sky. I wanted to take a video, but a loud group of young people passed near me and then the wind stopped. The leaves were still, and those were now different trees. Trees are a multitude of moments that end, start, and end again. My dad goes out for a walk on the same mountain every morning. He knows too that the mountain is a multitude of mountains, during the rainy season, or the dry season, under the January skies, or among October’s flowers, before sunrise under the light of the moon, or under the stars. If you can go back often to the same piece of the world, you learn that you can travel on the same spot, through time, and that a forest is a multitude of forests, just as the sky is a multitude of skies.
I write this on a bench, in a grey afternoon. It’s the end of the fall (the fall is also a multitude of falls). This one now, near the end of October, is a lot more monochromatic and the trees show their bones and the leaves still standing are almost all variations of copper. It’s cold and I write in a hurry because after a while my fingers start to hurt out of the pockets in my jacket. Its 5:30 and the sun will be gone in 40 minutes, but the sky is so full of clouds that all seems right now to be sinking in a sort of twilight. And against this twilight shine bright, almost fluorescent, the yellow patches of trees that tremble, irreplaceable, just for today, and just for me, in this moment.
