Rooting for the Tree

Trees should be entitled to so much more respect. They feed our earth. They inspire us. They make the world so beautiful in so many ways.
I cannot imagine what this earth would be like without them. What my life would be without them. “The Green Planet” not just the Blue.

That autumn feeling. The one I get when the colours amaze me, dazzle me. The feelings of delight at watching the leaves dancing in the wind.

The feelings of desolation and depression in the winter.
Branches and trunks laid bare and exposed. Nests and lodgings on view. Creatures in mourning, no longer hidden
amongst the branches.
The sense of loneliness and sorrow, I have, that these giants seem asleep, slumbering in their coldness and the darkness of the season.

Then Spring, the awakening. The spring freshness.
My joy when I see the re colouring of the landscape.
The brown bubble finally bursts, the green seeps through, the release of all those winter pressures.
The birds sing their celebrations, as the beautiful blossom starts its majestic descent to earth. Confetti to a magical event.

My work on tree roots, it is a voice to the trees` plight.
A voice to a living thing, which sadly has no voice. They have no way of expressing their opinions and their feelings.
How do we know that they have no feelings, no emotions?

Thoughts of their persecution. The desperation of their plight. It consumes me.
I feel their oppression.
Are they no more than a slave to the human race?

My work soothes my guilt, comforts my conscience. Let’s me display respect and honour for a living creature which I am shamefully unwilling to change the plight of.

I am a persecutor. I am guilty as everyone else. I love my advancement, my technology, my power. The fact that I am human. Top of the tree when it comes to making decision in this fragile and beautiful world.
I love it but also hate it.
I am cursed with a double-edged sword.
I have the power over my own decisions, but have little power within my race.
A race which often seems intent on destroying everything in the pursuit of even more power.

I do feel guilt, sadness, even shame over the way I am. But I also feel elation and absolution that I can try to fix what I break. Honour the sacrifice which makes my life better, and hopefully I can show what I feel, to my species, through my art.

The roots of a tree.
The slurry of the animal, The bones of the meat. The slag heap of the coal. The scales of the fish.
The discarded and unwanted, but the hidden, mysterious feature.
Each one different. Every part unique.
Tentacles tunnelling off in numerous directions. Competing with objects.
Feeling its way around the earth then delivering its promise to support the grandest of features.
Always remaining modest and unrecognised whilst the flamboyant arms and body, take all the glory, rising above the ground.

Creating beauty from a trees sacrifice, and to do it with the part of the tree which has shown such modesty, makes me smile.

The Beauty Beneath. The thoughts of Keith Key.

See the Beauty Beneath the Tree

A dishevelled mess of arms laying in orderly disarray,
remnants of the jungled web of lies and destruction.
Woven, interlocked, my distant progress halted in tunnelled freedom.
Defying gravity, my mudded tentacles snaking in those dark, forbidden places.

The air is thin, dark, musty.

A forgotten tomb where I lay alongside the decomposing history of my previous creations.
Still and numb, I am uninspired by the creatures that now recognise my beauty,
if only to eat my flesh and live in my bones.

My pomp, the season ceremonies, colours I displayed, the life I once accommodated:
all forgotten, like the photographs I proudly posed for.

Am I still beautiful, though my grandeur has been felled?
Lying dormant, asleep in this bed of a subterranean world.

Waiting.

Dreaming of the person with the x-ray eyes.

Come look beneath.
Discover me.

Make me beautiful again