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We experience wood as something that can grow, be burned, yield a musical sound when struck, etc. Fruits, leaves, stems, and roots can be eaten.
Wood is flexible and regenerates. It is common for a tree to re-grow a severed limb. There are many types of plants that can be grown from cuttings (asexual reproduction). The visual image of branching is applied to social phenomena: branch of a company, railroad line, family tree, etc. We call our nerve endings "dendrites" because they look like the finely divided ends of roots.
When we look at a tree, we see a "snapshot" like a single frame in the "movie" of its existence. The tree appears unable to move by itself. However, over the course of time, it slowly grows both upward and downward. The growth of its roots can break stone and cement.
One spring, when I was living in Japan, I observed the rapid growth of bamboo in my backyard. Shortly after emerging from the ground, each bamboo tree grew about a foot each day for several days. That pace is more than one centimeter per hour!
Wood also is able to "move" from generation to generation, as a forest spreads thruout an area by means of dropping seeds that grow into new trees.
Contemplate the fact that we can only see wood grow in our mind's eye, based on the accumulation of our past experiences of comparing the size of a plant at different points in time.
With modern technology, we can see such comparisons vividly by means of time-lapse photography that depicts the blossoming of a flower in less than one minute. Although a moment's glance gives us the impression that a tree is stationary, it is actually moving very slowly, following a natural plan of growth.
Wood is associated with air. Science teaches us that the oxygen in our atmosphere is replenished by the action of chlorophyll. The passive movement of wood is intimately associated with air. As Yoko Ono sang in a short song:
Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by.
Long before the invention of human artifacts such as flags and kites, the main way to detect a breeze that was too far away to feel was to see its effect on trees.
Trees are still a source of our daily experience of wind. As our eyes receive momentary images of randomly shifting branches, our mind's eye sees the unpredictability of the wind. On a larger time scale, we can experience striking contrasts between the caressing motion of swaying palm fronds and the sudden onset of a storm.
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