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Trees of Memory

The earth is a skein, a ball of common roots from which, sprout the trees: the baobab, arbre à parole around which the assembly meets: the acacia for the Toubous; the carob tree for the Amazigh; the Indian banyan spreading branches and roots in continuous life cycles; the balsamic eucalyptus of the Anangu; the ginkgo which survived the fire and radiation in Hiroshima; the post flood olive tree, whose branch was sent by god with a dove as sign of reconciliation with humanity; the auracaria and the cinnamon tree for the Mapuche; the Colombian wax palm tree; the kapok and the mangrove in the Amazon, the big leaves bitten and desperate to absorb excess carbon dioxide: their devastation is our suicide. Its not in vain that the Basques call the atmosphere eguratsa (breath of the wood): vestige of an earth which was imagined as ground, sky and abyss at the same time. A floor of intertwining, knotted roots between the telluric shell and the vaults of heaven. The roots and canopy connected by the trunk, a totem of hundreds of thousands of years, taller, older and more robust than people. For this reason the tree is venerated, for providing us with a floor under our feet and a roof over our heads and for being an enduring witness of popular assemblies: more precisely, they gather all that is learned, the crises, the transitions and the solutions in a ring of memory. Today more than ever we reclaim that oak tree: the keeper of the internal code of laws and of the individual sovereignty which, together form a sovereign society; and the nucleus of the legal code which is also a common forum.