🌳002 • The Symbolism of the Shade Tree
4.5 Minute Read
Some say the quest for discovery began with an apple. While I like to think of a shade tree as a mighty oak, there is a long mythology of the apple as representative of the quest for human knowledge for good and for evil. Including:
Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Although the Bible never names the fruit, popular tradition tells us it was an apple;
The mythology of Isaac Newton and the discovery of gravity as the apple falls from a tree. Many variations of this story are apocryphal tellings of a real event;
Apple, the first trillion dollar company in history, and the legend of Steve Jobs, the visionary founder and idea man who drove Apple to success via his “reality distortion field.”
Photo by Nikolai Chernichenko on Unsplash
Digital gardens, whether notes and ideas we build for our own pleasure, or to share with others, must make space for the fruit of deep shade-tree thinking. A space we give ourselves for the joy it brings to think deeply, as our inner world draws strength from the roots of our thinking to build and shape our lives.
Symbols exist to express ideas, help us craft and communicate meaning and allow us to taste the fruit of discovery. Metaphors, whether a garden or a shade tree, empower our thinking and enable us to shape the culture around us. Shade trees provide symbolism that can give force to the life we choose to live whether we actively make the choosing, or allow the force of life itself to be our proxy of choice.
The shade tree is many things, but for me it is:
A place of contemplation
An oasis where comfort, safety and protection exist
A place where we discover our human interdependence
A place where consciousness and unconsciousness interact
A map where we imprint the journey of our living and the lessons it brings
Part of the process I hope to achieve through this newsletter and the shade tree metaphor, is a process that allows us to sit under the shade tree with other thinkers and toss around ideas.
A Place of Contemplation
“True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace.”
-- Thomas Merton
Once ideas are brought forth, or shared with others, they need to be contemplated. This is the place where deep thought comes into play. We chew on those ideas, meditate on them, look at them from different angles and in different situations, to see how they might be adapted as tools for our own use, to see how they might move us toward the next discovery. It is a sacred space, and for true contemplation to take place, we must make a record of our ideas. We must put them down in writing, take note of the process, record the experiments, acknowledge the “failures” and celebrate our achievements. Each of these steps is part of the journey of discovery.
An Oasis
An oasis is a place where we can drink deeply as we seek to satisfy our thirst for knowledge. Where we can safely rest as we grow in wisdom and understanding of the world around us. Under the shade tree, we can tinker, experiment, and develop ideas to move us forward in our thinking. Even if at the moment our idea seems a failed experiment, it may pave the way for future success.
In their book, A Mind at Play, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman describe an apparent failed experimental machine that at first glance appeared to be a lawnmower:
“It was the failed first invention of a college senior, and though it ran just as promised, it bored nearly everyone beyond its twenty-two-year old creator . . . It was a geography machine, a device aimed to put land surveying teams out of business. . .
It earned a patent, and simultaneous bachelor’s and master’s degrees for its creator, but little else. He made the corporate rounds and failed to sell a single one, or even the license for the patent” (21 - 23).
A Place of Interdependence
Trees are interdependent with one another; humans are interdependent with trees. An integral part of all human life is interdependence in spite of the focus of many on their “rugged individualism ”. Humans are created to communicate with one another, to depend on one another, to grow through our capacity to reach beyond ourselves. Our ideas are part of the shared interdependent human condition, even ideas produced by the same individual can produce interconnected results years apart.
Interdependence produces discovery, and discovery drives innovation.
Let’s return to the failed “lawnmower” inventor described by Soni and Goodman:
“. . . In twenty years the guts of this lawnmower will run the most powerful thinking machine that human hands have ever built . . .”
. . . the twenty-two-year old inventor would one day be, although he couldn’t possibly imagine it yet, the most powerful scientist in America.” (22).
That 22-year-old inventor was the famed Vannevar Bush, nicknamed by Time magazine in 1944 the “General of Physics.”
Consciousness and Unconsciousness
What lies deep is brought forth to energize and produce something large and expansive that is a deep expression of our life in general. It is here that we learn to dream and under the shade-tree we have symbolism that expresses our desire, knowledge, hopes and personal growth.
A shade-tree has weathered the storms, expanded its reach and as a metaphor for our thinking, the shade-tree symbolizes the power, stability and strength we will gain from the storms that life brings us. A shade-tree is a reflection of the self-work each of us is doing.
Photo by Norbert Tóth on Unsplash
A Map of Our Journey
Our thinking is most effective when we create a map of our journey. This allows us to imprint our thought and experience for our future selves as well as others with whom we interact.
Good note-taking produces a record of our innermost travels, and like a shade tree, the branches that rise high in our lives are grounded by a deeply rooted network of invisible conscious and unconscious thinking shaping our perception of reality. A record of our ideas provides an x-ray into our thinking that brings us greater clarity about self, reveals the biased thinking limiting us, and creates an opportunity for us to better communicate our best ideas to others.
For Further Reading
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
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