They're all around us, sticking up out of the earth. Late in the year, I began to really see their strangeness: these branchy, rooty cherubim, standing in mute witness to us, containing in their divisions and multiplications the key to the universe, if only we could see them clearly. They're plenty beautiful when garbed in summer green, but shocking in winter, in their splendid naked fractality. I can't drive by one now without fixing my eye on it and watching it twist by.

here are some pictures i took last winter.

i love how the trees above define the space given them, creating that vaulting firmament for the mind to fly around in.

my trees of jubilation: next