Trees, Besieging

Chesterton once remarked of that “the trees are straining and tearing and lashing as if they were a tribe of dragons each tied by the tail” in poetic form when a swift zephyr was gusting through the foliage.  I do think that is an apt metaphor, but to me they seem more like the protrusion of arrowheads on arrows thrust through the earth from unseen chasms below with immense tensile strength and simultaneous rigidity.  At other times they look like giant green lungs, and in one very real sense, they are the lungs of the earth.  Tolkien was perhaps the most sensible on the interpretation of the form of trees, however, as the Ents from the ‘Lord of the Rings’ are simply giants with the morphology of trees.  ‘The Wizard of Oz’ was keen to notice that apple trees look like giants that, if bewitched, use their own apples as little hand grenades.  I think these latter two imaginations of trees are far closer to the truth than we like to admit.  The trees, indeed, can fight for us or turn against us.  They give of themselves to us, both in timber and in fruit, and even in oxygen; but they can withhold from us as well - and these blessings and cursings are in direct connection covenantal faithfulness. Lest we forget, the ground itself was cursed in the garden, of nothing in accordance with what it had done, but in direct connection to what Adam had done.   We could fight against the trees, but besieging them would be truly besieging ourselves.  

Praise be to God, however, that when one Adam besieged heaven at a tree, the second Adam besieged death at a tree.