To touch the paradox is to approach the mystery. The tree is the ultimate symbol, from which psychology and the human psyche can draw meaning and an image of its feelings and reality.
The tree is the image of humanity: from its growth, differentiation and separation emerge. From the starting unit of the tree trunk, branches and leaves or needles unfold. At the base, there is only a single trunk, at the top an expansion and a sparse and disparate diversity of branches. Humanity at its beginnings is only unity: from the principle of creation to the cry of the newborn, these similarities are beyond time and cultures. Then, as they mature, the children grow and assert their differences.
Their particularities characterize them, but also separate them from each other. The more they grow and become more individualized, the more they move away from each other. Despite their separations, their roots and trunks are common. Despite their distances from each other, their origins and their first stages of maturity remain unity. And their separate parts contribute to their whole. At the top, everything is separation and apparent solitude.
But the summits probably have more to contribute and give than when they were non-individualized aspects of the trunk or branches of the base. It is at the end of our greatest individualization, which can seemingly only bring isolation and separation, that it is possible to give the most to the group. The fruit is the culmination of the plant’s growth, its final point. But this fruit is also the ultimate offering.
Reiner Maria Rilke writes: “A complete sharing between two people is an impossibility. And whenever it nevertheless seems to exist, it is a narrowing, a mutual agreement which deprives one of the members, or the two, of its full freedom and its development But, once admitted that, even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful cohabitation side by side can grow, if they manage to love. the distance that separates them, which allows each to see the other completely against a vast sky”.