A story about a strange tree.
It's a story about a strange tree.
It was a secret, but ...
she was already four feet to the left from her birthplace.
How was that possible?
Although it was a tree, it had no roots. For a long time she did not notice that she had no roots. When she was born for the first time, there was a big old tree next to her whose shade hindered her photosynthesis and so she grew up very slowly. It annoyed her a bit because she wanted to grow faster and see the sky.
On an ordinary day, as usual, she tried to avoid the shadow of the big tree and bent her trunk with all her strength toward the sunlight to receive the light. And then suddenly, a jolt went through her body, and she noticed that she had moved slightly to the side.
It was a great discovery for herself. She was very surprised. She thought she might have imagined it. So she moved to the left again to see if it was a mistake.
But it was true. She had moved. Soon she was no longer in the shadows.
Since then she had continued to move very slowly to the left. It happened very secretly, so that nobody could notice. Of course, she had never heard of moving trees and she instinctively knew that this should be her own secret.
So she changed her position every time the wind blew. Only an inch at a time.
The old tree next to her was dull so he did not notice how she was slowly moving away from him.
There wasn't really any reason she kept moving left. She moved simply because she could move, and suddenly she realized she didn't have roots, so she went even further to the left.
If she kept moving, maybe one day she could walk away from this place and be a tree in a completely different, new environment.
She could live completely different compared to here: if she kept moving, she could end up on a noisy and dirty street, someone could throw trash or cigarette buds on her tree trunk, or she could hear loud car horns instead of birdsong.
Or maybe she could unfortunately be cut down by forestry and sawed off in seconds.
I don't know where she wants to go or why she's moving.
All I know is that she won't stop moving.
The second story of a strange tree.
One day she met another old tree at the edge of the forest. He spoke to her.
"You are a tree that can move, right?"
Nobody had noticed for a long time. So she was quite surprised that he'd discovered her identity.
He began to tell her a story: once upon a time, a very, very long time ago, there were more trees that could move.
At that time, an infectious disease was spreading worldwide and people all had to stay at home.
A man who had nothing to do at home looked out of the window all day.
One day he noticed that the apple tree in his garden had moved about a foot to the side.
At first he thought that he was finally going crazy because he had just stayed at home for such a long time.
It's absurd, he told himself, that the tree can move. He doubted his perception, so he carefully watched the tree for three months.
When the tree finally reached the garden table, the man sent a report to a television program.
The director of the program also looked at the tree for about three months and when the tree finally arrived on the doorstep, he then broadcast a program with the title: WHAT HAPPENS IN THE WORLD: SELF-MOVING TREES DISCOVERED.
The TV show with this particular news was a huge hit. The world was so excited and the tree at the man's house had become a star overnight.
Several television stations from around the world came to the house to report about the tree. They broadcast the news about the tree over a period of several months. In this way, they were able to document the tree's movement paths over time and thus prove the fact that it was actually able to move.
But at some point the tree wasn't that special anymore. It was moving too slowly and too boringly, and then suddenly a lot of people found moving trees in many places.
There were some trees that were found in another garden within a few days. It was too much for people. These moving trees went against their grain. They installed various devices to prevent the trees from running away. Later these devices were perfected, mass-produced and sold in order to be able to chain the trees in the garden like on a dog leash. Even the environmentalists spoke out against the movement of the trees, as some plants that had been raised at home suddenly disappeared and were soon to be found in neighboring countries. One day, when a large tree was moving, it scratched the car parked by the road.
The trees often made the streets dirty by knocking over the trash cans on the side of the road when they moved. So many small, destructive things happened over and over again. They weren't really bad accidents and they didn't cause any real problems, but the people who were already stressed and sensitive from the infectious disease didn't like the moving trees. These trees became the black sheep of the world.
Someone immediately cut down the tree in his garden that he had been raising himself for ten years because it began to move. He killed him, made logs out of his wood and happily used them for barbeques.
The complaints increased because not only did the house plants and house trees start moving, but the mountain trees, too.
People couldn't manage each tree individually, so a very powerful root stimulant was invented so that all trees would develop deep roots and then settle in one spot. It turned out that the moving trees had no roots.
(It has been said that the first moving tree was experimented on in the laboratory, and that is where the life of the tree ended.)
The soil on which the root stimulant was administered made the roots of the trees stronger and fast-growing, and eventually the moving trees slowly disappeared.
But nobody knows exactly when and why the trees suddenly started moving. And it was so long ago that there isn't a single person on earth nowadays who knows that this sensational event once happened.
The third story of trees that were strange once but aren't strange anymore.
When the tree lady heard the story, she was a little sad, but amazed that trees like her had existed before.
Since she lived on the mountain, she could also hear a lot of news from all over the world. Many things also happened in the forest where she lived and she sometimes met winds, birds and insects with different news that amazed her.
But she had never heard of a moving tree. This old tree said it could move before, too. It originally stood in the botanical gardens where he was born and raised.
He lacked nothing and couldn't complain, the temperature and humidity were perfect in all four seasons. He was always cared for with good nutrients, so his leaves were always green and beautifully shiny. He remembered his first step, which happened unexpectedly. He found that he could take huge strides. He was very exuberant because of this and moved several times in large strides. So he went very far away from the botanical garden during the night.
The next day, an employee noticed that the tree had disappeared from the botanical gardens. The police searched the whole city to find him, but unfortunately they couldn't find him because he had already gone too far.
He told her that he had come very far with his many movements and traveled for a long time, and then he arrived here because of the massive root promotion.
There probably wasn't a tree in this area that had lived as long as he did. Luckily, this place where he was forced to stay at turned out to be very suitable for him. He said that otherwise he would certainly have been sawn off or chopped up somewhere else and could have died as firewood.
He had always been a lucky tree ever since he was born.
She figured that if she hadn't moved, she wouldn't have learned about the story of the moving tree until she died, so she felt lucky, too.
And she was curious if there were still other moving trees, and she wished to meet those trees.
And she also asked the old tree if he knew any of the other moving trees or if he had ever tried to move again. In his time when many trees could move, he was able to meet and get to know other trees through many journeys. Even though there were a lot of moving trees, it was still something special for the trees. Therefore there were also many trees that were envious or jealous.
So when a new moving tree came into their forest, they would throw it out and even fight with it.
But when the days of the root promoters were over and all of them could not move together, the trees that were jealous came to rest again. But maybe these were also the first feelings trees had in their lives.
He said that he had been immobile for a long time and that he had no particular interest in hiking. So, he said, he didn't have to figure out if he could move or not. He was content with the current environment and would spend the rest of his life here. He would stay here even if he could move.
She was jealous of him because he had so much experience. At the same time she was afraid that something might happen to her. Her life in the forest was quite peaceful, only if a storm came she might lose some leaves. That would be bad. But the leaves would grow again.
When she still had strong roots, the last typhoon was uneventful. She had no injuries at the time.
She wondered when her roots had started to disappear. Suddenly, because of her curiosity and fear, she began to ask questions that she hadn't had before. And there were also some decisions that she had never had to make before.
She had to decide whether to stop here or continue moving. She had also thought about whether she could call herself a tree at all. Anyway, she didn't know why it was all happening. But she wanted to move simply because she could move. Then if it was a wrong decision, if it was a wrong way, then she wouldn't care.
And then she thought: What do you call this movement? To move without purpose.
People call it a walk. Then she should also go for a walk and again take a step to the left.