There are many intriguing trees on the Berkeley campus. I have my favorites. I've always thought that such trees have spirits, and Nigel here just embodies that belief in a playful way.
Here's a favorite poem from Seamus Heaney about walking in the woods:
THE PLANTATION
Any point in that wood
Was a centre, birch trunks
Ghosting your bearings,
Improvising charmed rings
Wherever you stopped.
Though you walked a straight line,
It might be a circle you travelled
With toadstools and stumps
Always repeating themselves.
Or did you re-pass them?
Here were bleyberries quilting the floor,
The black char of a fire,
And having found them once
You were sure to find them again.
Someone had always been there
Though always you were alone.
Lovers, birdwatchers,
Campers, gipsies and tramps
Left some trace of their trades
Or their excrement.
Hedging the road so,
It invited all comers
To the hush and mush
Of its whispering treadmill,
Its limits defined,
So they thought from outside.
They must have been thankful
For the hum of the traffic
If they ventured in
Past the picnickers' belt
Or began to recall
Tales of fog on the mountains.
You had to come back
To learn how to lose yourself,
To be pilot and stray--witch,
Hansel and Gretel in one.
--Seamus Heaney
