The impossible tree.

He passed ten million miracles on his way to town.

“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

I was listening to a podcast about biological agency. Stay with me. The idea is that living things aren’t just passive genetic machines, but agents—that even a cell or a seed wants, acts, and strives. We’re used to thinking of evolution as blind variation, but there’s growing evidence for inherited memory and directional adaptation at the cellular level. The whole conversation was about this hidden aliveness: the will, the wanting, the quiet, universal learning that separates what’s alive from what’s merely there.

Late in the conversation, the guest said something truer than he knew.

He drives to town, he said, and passes maybe ten million trees—big ones, little ones, every kind. He notices none of them. But if he saw a tree that was somehow impossible—one made of glass, or growing upside down with its roots in the air, or a deep, unnatural purple—he’d remember it for the rest of his life. Because it would break the rules. It would be something he thought couldn’t be.

His idea underneath this is a beautiful one, and I don’t want to dismiss it. He thinks the mind is always testing the edges of the possible, that we spend our sleeping hours forming guesses about what the world can contain, and our waking hours playing them out. The impossible tree lodges in memory forever because it enlarges the map. It whispers: the world can hold something I didn’t know it could hold.

I love that idea. So let me take it all the way.

Because if that’s the measure, if what stops us and stays with us is whatever stretches our sense of what the world can contain, then he drove right past his own point. He was waiting for something that looked impossible, surrounded by things that genuinely were.

Consider what an actual tree is. A seed the size of a fingernail falls into the dirt. From that speck, over decades, sometimes centuries, a living tower assembles itself. It hauls water eighty feet into the air against gravity, with no pump. It eats light, turning sunshine into sugar in a trick we still can’t fully reproduce. It breathes out the exact gas we need to live and breathes in the one we can’t. It survives droughts, ice storms, fires, three hundred winters. It feeds its neighbors, insects, birds and soil and us. It rebuilds itself every spring out of nothing but light and rain and time. And it does all this silently, at the side of the road, ten million times over, while a brilliant man drives past and sees not one.

Now, someone will object that in saying all this I’ve done the very thing that kills wonder. That by cataloguing the machinery, the water pressure, the chemistry of light, I’ve drained the magic out and left a diagram. John Keats leveled this charge two hundred years ago, at a dinner where he accused Newton of destroying all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors. He put it into verse in Lamia:

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
...
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
...
Unweave a rainbow.

Keats had it backwards. The facts don’t drain the wonder out of the world. The facts are the wonder. It should astonish you more, not less, to know that a rainbow is light itself pulled apart into the colors it was secretly carrying all along and hung in the air over your commute. The tree is running a chemistry we can’t reproduce, lifting water higher than any pump could raise it. Knowing that doesn’t kill the wonder. It is the wonder. Cold philosophy didn’t unweave the rainbow. It showed you how impossible the rainbow actually is, and you looked away anyway, because you’d already filed it under ordinary. The poetry was never destroyed by the explaining. It was destroyed by the not-looking.

And it doesn’t stop at rainbows and trees. A bird is a warm-blooded animal that defies gravity and crosses oceans steering by the stars, and it used to be a dinosaur. Your own hand is a piece of the earth that somehow learned to grip, and feel, and know that it is yours. Every one of these is more impossible than a purple tree. And every one of them, we drive straight past.

So why is that? Why does the ordinary miracle go invisible?

I wrote about this in Unwinding Want, chasing a single word: mundane. We use it to mean dull, forgettable, beneath our attention. But it comes from the Latin mundus, meaning the world. The mundane, at its root, means of this world: the trees, the birds, the faces across the table, the hand at the end of your arm. It was only later, with the rise of a faith that placed the real action in a heavenly realm, that “worldly” curdled into “lesser.” Earthly things, birds and trees, children and colleagues, became the uninteresting stuff, less important than what waited somewhere else.

And we never stopped. We just swapped heavens. We took our gaze off the beauty of the now and fixed it on a destination: the promotion, the arrival, the finished version of ourselves, the happily-ever-after. Life became a journey to somewhere better, and everything here became scenery. Just things we use to get there. Or things that get in our way.

Look again at the podcast guest’s own example. He is driving to town. The town is the destination, the thing that matters, the place he’s going. The ten million trees are what he passes through to get there. They aren’t the point. They’re the commute. He has done, on one ordinary drive, exactly what we’ve all done with one ordinary life: aimed himself at the arrival and turned the whole living world into the distance he has to cross.

But have you ever met anyone who actually arrived? Who improved and accumulated and became someone, and then finally relaxed into blissful, childlike completeness, calm, unafraid, lit up by life? Me either. The ultra-successful are buying islands and building bunkers to hide from the very life they were supposedly climbing toward. The destination was always a mirage. And while we chase it, the only thing that was ever real, the light on the water, the smell of the rain, the person walking down the road, slides by the window, unseen, filed under mundane.

So the ordinary world isn’t the lesser experience. It’s the harder one. Anyone can be jolted by an impossible-looking tree. The strangeness does the work for you, no attention required. To be moved by a plain oak you’ve passed six hundred times asks something the strange tree never asks. Presence. The willingness to look at what you’ve decided is scenery and see that it was never scenery at all.

Beauty was never in the tree. There is no inherent beauty, and no inherent dullness. Both live in the looking. Beauty is a sensitivity and responsiveness to the aliveness of a thing, and the same tree is a miracle or a blur depending entirely on whether anyone is home behind the eyes. The strange tree makes the choice for you. The ordinary tree leaves the choice to you.

Jesus said, in the Gospel of Thomas, that the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it. He wasn’t naming a place you travel to. He was naming a way of seeing, one you practice or you don’t, right here, in the mundus, among the ten million trees. Not a journey to somewhere. A state of presence, alertness, sensitivity to what is already, impossibly, here.

So the guest was right. He’ll remember the impossible tree forever, if he ever meets one. But I’d offer him the harder, better memory. Not the one that only looks impossible. The one that actually is: the living, light-eating, century-standing marvel he passes every morning on his way to town, and has never once seen.

It’s there again tomorrow. Rooted, patient, holding its quiet impossibility at the edge of the road.

The only question is whether anyone will be there to notice.

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Stay passionate!