Every ring is a year remembered. The tree does not forget drought or abundance — it writes both into its body, encoding seasons as geometry. To read a cross-section is to hold a diary that was never meant to be opened.
Growth is not always outward. Sometimes the thinnest ring holds the most meaning — the year the forest burned, the year the rains returned, the year a child carved initials that the bark slowly swallowed.
Beneath every forest is another forest — invisible, patient, vast. The root network is the tree's true body, its hidden self, reaching through darkness toward water and mineral and the roots of its neighbors. Underground, every tree is holding hands.