For ages, medicine has concerned itself with prolonging life. Steve Jobs is someone who has said death is the likely the best invention of life. "It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." Medicine proves the opposite: death is an unnecessary and obviously arbitrary part of every living organism that we can modify always for the better, not the worse. Humans lived on average 25 years as cavemen a few hundred thousand years ago. Now there are humans who live over 110 years. That must be some kind of record? Actually... Koy, Whales, and Tortoises have lived to be twice as old. And here's the secret reason they're not biologically programmed to die: they have endless resources.
"Lifespans are genetically controlled according to the resource limitations of a given environment."
"Bar-Yam's work suggests that aging is a mechanism — if not the mechanism — that works to define and limit the lifespans of animals."
Evolution's medicine is nutrition. Nutrition is our medicine. In the forest lives Methuselah, 4,847 years old. He's somewhere known but hidden by protective tree-lovers like yours truly. Somewhere hidden by tree-lovers distrustful of scientists who broke off a drill in the oldest tree in 1964 and removed it before it was named and before it fulfilled its destiny. The bristlecone pine, like the scientist who broke his drill inside it's godfather, twists on itself. The bristlecones I'll show in some abundance below are all from the ancient bristlecone forest in Inyo county...I think...
The tree twists on itself. Cracks in the bark reveal protected layers and life inside. The outside decays, bit-by-bit. A creeping mold of aging that you might image moves itself as slowly as our endlessly evolving subject, the afternoon shadow of a bristlecone's life. The bark in the top photo you could easily compare to human muscles, or a knee joint. You can see there's strength and fortitude in the somewhat gangly a pock-marked bristlecone. The twisting gives the tree a strength it displays in different manners. In the fourth photo, the top half seems to rest atop a flat foundation we can't see.
The tree leans in one direction and supports itself in the other. Each branch exhibits startling possibilities. It springs up and dances without movement. Anatomically human potential. The twisting bark molds with incredible ease and variation. Like a Dali sculpture, the top branches seem to depict the highest freedom. Ballerinas with wooden limbs in addition to wooden toes. She looks so good, she's made out of wood...she said so. Their limbs have an affected limpness which is also the lightness of space around them.
The twisting bark molds with incredible ease and variation. It supports and relies on itself in a completely enmeshed turning and earning. No more monkey jumping on the bed. But there's no more fitting image than Methuselah rising up from the flood seven days dead on this very tree. The branches risen arms frozen and sent from the Inferno's river of the dead to move, passing the oldest man to his place in eternity. Hands frozen in time, nothing to do for them but wait and shuffle the next body down to its inevitable destination. These branches do their job, but no one, I mean no one, has a job for them.
The trees swallow their life in, creating layers of themselves which slowly decay one-by-one, bit-by-bit. The fibrous tree lives in Northern Cali, with little soil, lots of rainfall, and snow. But what makes it persist? The real question: is it the rock-like qualities of the pine? A tree that's smooth like an ever-wettened rock is more than a peculiar sight. The sediment of bark takes ages to settle into its natural place. It twists with the greatest time and sensitivity, slowly for its aging progeny and softly to weather weather solidly. It fulfills all its subtle movements, and never gets exhausted, never even turns back, the black mold slowly speeding its pace?
What's really beautiful about the bristlecone? Could it be? The bark possesses a quality of animal skin in a variety astoundingly created by so much nature in one organism. It might be an awesome napping chair, branches holding up your arms with slight twists to extend your spine and relieve lower back pressure. Methuselah would be beautiful to a small child, like me, once enamored with the way my mom's skin glowed. Methuselah is a truly fitting name in a way: we humans have it a lot better than other animals. To be fair, they might have endless resources, but we do too, we just don't know how to twist it out of each other.
Here is an informative blog about the ancient bristlecone pine forest:
https://paintyourlandscape.com/2012/11/14/where-is-methuselah-ancient-bristlecone-pine-forest-ca/
Terry Reid: Brave Awakening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BrGgmJ0SAU
