If you encounter a tree from above
If you encounter a tree from above,
you’ll see a hundred branches
diverging in all directions,
a paralyzing (almost) endowment of choice
and you think, “I can take any one of them and there will be even more branches”;
so you take one,
but discover
they all converge at the trunk
toward and beneath the soil.
It’s so strange that we think that for others, younger than us, it will be different, which is a peculiar kind of hope.