I watched the tree outside the window a lot, it was a very wise little tree.
It had branches and roots and leaves and a rubbish bin that sat beside it on a small steel pole. I made a game of the scene. It was to decide whether the tree was the tree or the bits were the tree and it used to tie my head in a knot. A knot of nots.
It was a riddle that kept me in state.
Branches, roots, sap, cells, atoms…versus…
Tree, nests, water and soil, birds and bins…
As I forced myself to ponder this I began to suspect that they were the same, that the two paths unfurled like ribbons before me and joined somewhere behind my back. When the day was grey, there was a crow that came to sit on the edge of the bin. It landed on the rim and took pieces of rubbish, one at a time from the bin and cast them down to the ground. Splat. Crunch. Rattle. One after the other. Litterbug bird. It made an awful mess, so much that there was a man employed just to clean it all up again.
Ridiculous.
When the man came down to crouch and clean, the crow would fly up and away, sit on a gutter or a rooftop nearby and stare all confused at the man. I would stare too and together we would wonder.