To my left - a stunning pair of ginkgo trees don their brilliant yellow hues. It was just days before the leaves would drop. Completely enthralled, I stop and sit on a bench across from them to take in the beauty of the trees. There is an incredible sense of strength, history, and wisdom from this spot. Surrounded by memorials from the Revolutionary war, stately buildings over two centuries old, and the ginkgo trees which are many decades old and will likely exist many decades beyond my lifetime.
Ginkgo trees carry symbolic meaning for eastern and western cultures including hope, peace, strength, and longevity. They are a pre-historic tree species with ancestors that survived the ice age, the blast of Hiroshima, as well as dramatically changing climatic conditions over hundreds of millions of years. In their presence, it is possible to see this history embedded in the very structure of these trees. The roughly textured cool gray bark, the angular shaped branches with alternating nubs that sprout bunches of leaves in the spring, and the fan-shaped two-lobed leaves speak of an entirely different age. In their presence, I feel transported.
