I have always found Shel Silverstein’s children’s book “The Giving
Tree” book so profound. The tree can be analogous to many things that support us and nurture us throughout our lives and help form our identities only
to be forgotten and thought of little of as time goes by. It could be our
parents, a loving aunt or uncle, a beloved pet, a home town or this home that we all share called Earth. Here is a link to an animated telling of this
story if you are not familiar.
Another great tree story for children of all ages: "The Fall of Freddie the Leaf" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnlSI9KyrDc
ReplyDeleteAnd more recently, Richard Powers' "The Overstory" - “Writing The Overstory quite literally changed my life, starting with where and how I live,” the author Richard Powers told the Chicago Review of Books. Before writing the book, Powers had been living and teaching in Palo Alto, between tech-centric Silicon Valley and California’s old-growth forests. An encounter with a giant redwood shook him; in a Guardian profile, he describes it as a kind of “religious conversion” that showed him his place in “a system of meaning that doesn’t begin and end with humans.” Powers then began work on the novel, and his research took him to Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. Months later, he moved there to live deep in the woods, where “walking a trail has become as important to me as writing...”
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/richard-powers-pulitzer-the-overstory/587245/