It’s a mystery. Trees grow straight up. Not towards the sun, though. That thing comes in at every crazy angle.

I mean, why don’t trees grow towards that dawn instead? But no. Up it is.

But not always! When there’s room, then there’s a lot of leaning going on. Well, at least with black spruce, or at least with black spruce with roots giving way. They started straight, at least.

I’d say, it has little to do with the sun, this straightness. It has a lot to do with water being drawn up through a growing tip, that is growing in all directions except where it was before. Stuff like that is going to rise like a river. The trees are just its banks.

A bank is a bar that a flow throws up — originally, anyway. Sure, from a contemporary perspective it’s the Earth holding water in place, but that’s not how my ancestors saw it, and yours neither, I suspect. Flow it was, and exuberance. But what strange rivers! Their deltas are clouds. Their sea is the sky!

On ladders of water molecules they climb, within the memory of where they have been.

Beats this:

I mean, if you want to remember living things.

Which is a way of minding them and being conscious.