The Rings — What the Baobab Keeps of Its Years

We are taught to count. Birthdays, years of service, days since the last rain.

A number feels like proof that the time actually passed, and that we were there for it.

Counting is how we hold on to what we are afraid of losing.

What the body keeps instead

The baobab keeps its age another way. Look for yearly lines in its wood and they will not be in any reliable order. Layers form and merge and go missing. Even the people who study a single tree for years can disagree about how old it is, and the disagreement can run to centuries.

The tree records its time as mass. What grows stays and thickens. The trunk widens in small increments nobody is present to watch, and after long enough the tree carries a presence it did not have before, with no line inside it that anyone could point to and name as a particular year.

We are closer to that than we usually admit. The person across the table is not a tidy archive of birthdays. They are the accumulated width of everything that happened and was absorbed.

Think of the people you have known longest. You cannot date the changes in them either. Something widened over years without announcing itself, and one day you noticed and could not say when it began.

Some years leave almost no mark

A year without rain shows up faintly in a tree, if it shows at all. The long stretches where nothing appeared to be happening are most of what the tree is made of, which is worth hearing as comfort rather than warning.

Few of us could say which year was hardest. We remember the events and not the endurance.

We have written before about the dry season, and what the baobab does when nothing grows. A tree in a lean year is not failing. It is spending everything it has on staying where it is, and that leaves less to show than one good season would.

And sometimes the middle goes

Old baobabs often hollow. The oldest part stops being solid, the inside opens, and water gathers in the space. People have lived inside the hollow of a baobab, and animals have been kept in one.

What is left of the record is a ring of living wood around an opening. The tree keeps standing and keeps adding, and the empty middle is not a wound it is managing. It is where the tree lives now.

We have written before about the hollow, and the room the tree keeps inside itself. Many of us have a middle that no longer holds the earliest things. That does not mean those years went unlived. It means the record is partial, the way records are.

A practice for the week

Find one thing that carries its years where you can see them. Hands. A table with cup rings worn into the wood, a tool gone smooth in the grip of whoever uses it.

Do not count anything about it. Look for long enough that you stop naming what you see and start noticing what has accumulated. Then give the person nearest you the same kind of attention, and let the arithmetic go.

What we are is mostly what we carried and never tallied. The tree has no idea how old it is, and it does not need to. It is busy being old the way it was busy being young, without notes.

What have you been carrying long enough that it has become part of your shape?

The Eye watches. The Tree stands. The Delve awaits.