This
fact blew my
mind.
I had at some
level always thought of
trees as
extensions of the
Earth, imagining their
roots somehow sucking in the
dirt and turning that
solid matter into
bark and
wood and
branches and
stems and
leaves.
But in fact, only a tiny percentage of the matter of trees comes from what has been drawn from the
soil.
Instead, the vast bulk of the
molecules which make a tree a grand and solid thing are
carbon and
oxygen drawn from the
air around them over the length of their days and months and years. Even the tallest trees (in fact
especially the tallest trees) and the densest woods are almost entirely reconfigurations of the air around them, the colorless and weightless element felt only in the
wind as it blows.
Remember this -- how weighty and solid things, things you can build a
house from, can start in the
ethereality as their form, and be transformed by the
miracle of the natural world.
For IRON NODER XVIII: NEGLIGENCE IS THE RUST OF THE SOUL