When I fell, every future move exploded apart in my mind, a deck of cards thrown in the air.

Many people think trees grow so big from soil and water, but this is not true. Trees get their mass from the air. They gobble up airborne carbon dioxide and perform an act of chemical fission by using the energy from sunshine... Essentially, trees are made of air and sunshine.

I saw the Eagle Tree for the first time on the third Monday of the month of March, which I guess could be considered auspicious if I believed in magic or superstition or religion...

This tree was a vast cylinder of wood. It filled the sky. The limbs reached out above me, a great canopy sheltering the rest of the trees, as if they were its children.

My arms sometimes move on their own in big flapping motions, as if I might take off, and my hands spin like a hummingbird’s wings.

The trees reach up above me toward the sky, stretching out their great limbs in an intricate pattern that reminds me of the pattern of light... the pattern shifting back and forth as I climb.

The branches are a storm around me, and I fall into a deep well of green. The needles and limbs rush past. It is a whirling motion of green and brown branches.

The forest was all around me now... The ground soft and warm with light and growth... I could almost hear the ceaseless excavations of the flowing bloodstream underneath the earth skin of this vast organism. I touched the outreaching roots of the trees... I could feel that nearly invisible network of capillary roots... I breathed in and out. I was part of the forest. I was alive.

A rising tower of wood and needles and branches and great slabs of bark that has grown for hundreds of years. An impossible castle made from air and sunlight, fixed in place by the power of photosynthesis and chlorophyll. Magic. With lights.