The allegory tree - A tree is home to many stories

A lyrical serenade to, life, poem, biology and interconnectedness, with a spirit and sensibility kindred to the
emotional experience that a mother goes through during pregnancy in the form of a Payal.

It started with tree of life in biology and ended with tree of life in mythology, that reminded me of
Ursula K. Le Guin’s lovely insistence that “Science describes accurately from outside, poetry
describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they
describe.” That is in this case life itself. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge… the
impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. So I have decide to take both as
my guiding inspiration.

Throughout history tree of life had different meaning. I intend to look at it this way, here it is Ode
to the Science, Strangeness, love. Poetry and Splendour of Pregnancy. . Each of us has undergone
this absolutely astonishing process, with no conscious memory of it at all, and yet somehow we
don’t walk around in perpetual astonishment that this is how we came to be and I intended to

I desired to make something beautiful and tender that invites the mother and the loved ones around
her to look more deeply into the nature of the world, into their own nature and its magnificent
interconnectedness to all of nature. A gift to, contemplate, consider, and explore by its own — not
as creatures hopelessly different from and dwarfed by the organisms that tree of life in biology
profiles, but as fellow beings in an intricately entwined mesh of life. What emerges is a beautiful
breakage of our illusion of separateness and a deep appreciation for the binds that pull us and these
remarkable organisms in an eternal dance.

The trees of life here is the reminders of our own ephemerality and their endurance long beyond
ours, and in their uprightness they stood in the landscape like guardians and witnesses, breakage of
our illusion of separateness and a deep appreciation for the binds that pull us and these remarkable
organisms in an eternal dance. Reverencing the secret lives of trees as portals into the inner life of
nature, into the wildness of our own nature, into a supra-natural universe of myth, science and
magic. I believe nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.

The second inspiration is the herbarium — which survives — became Emily Dickinson’s first
formal exercise in composition and in mine too at the initial stages of designing the payal, and
although she came to reverence the delicate interleaving of nature in so many of her stunning, spare,
strange poems, this one — the one she wrote in 1865 — illuminates and magnifies these
relationships through the lens of a single flower and everything that goes into making its bloom —
this emblem of seduction — possible: the worms in the soil , the pollinators in the spring air, all the
creatures both competing for resources and symbiotically aiding each other. And, suddenly, the
flower emerges not as this pretty object to be admired, but as this ravishing system of aliveness — a
kind of silent symphony of interconnected resilience. Darwin could not comprehend how flowers
could emerge so suddenly and take over so completely. He called it an “abominable mystery.
Without flowers, there would be no us. No poetry. No science. No music. Flowers appeared and
carpeted the world with astonishing rapidity — they invented love.

There is grandeur in this view of life- Charles Darwin

- Gauri Rathi