“tale of the world is like a tree”
Took this photo while walking home the other night. This boutique flowershop always draws me in…as if there is an unfinished story in the plants and flowers…and if I stayed just long enough I might hear it to the end this one time.
“Sara Kendell once read somewhere that the tale of the world is like a tree. The tale, she understood, did not so much mean the niggling occurrences of daily life. Rather it encompassed the grand stories that caused some change in the world and were remembered in ensuing years as, if not histories, at least folktales and myths. […]
Though in later years she never could remember who had written that analogy of tale to tree, the image stayed with her. It was so easy to envision:
Sturdily rooted in the past, the tale’s branches spread out through the days to come. The many stories that make up its substance unfold from bud to leaf to dry memory and back again, event connecting event like the threadwork of a spider’s web, so that each creature of the world plays its part, understanding only aspects of the overall narrative, and perceiving, each with its particular talents, only glimpses of the Great Mystery that underlies it all.
The stories on their own are many, too myriad to count, and their origins are often too obscure or inconsequential on their own to be recognized for what they are. The Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero said it best: “The beginnings of all things are small.”
Though he lived and died some two thousand years before Sara was born, and though the tale was so entangled by the time she came into it that it would have been an exercise in futility to attempt to unravel its many threads, Sara herself came to agree with Cicero. Years later she could pinpoint the exact moment that brought her into the tale…”
excerpt from the first chapter in Moonheart by Charles de Lint
