Have you ever seen The Man Who Planted Trees (L'homme qui plantait des arbres)? It's on YouTube now. It's based on a book (which I haven't read) and we had the animation adaptation on VHS growing up. It's about a solitary shepherd and his single-handed effort to reforest a barren valley near the Alps. Eventually, thanks to his consistent and daily work, a forest flourishes. The simple fact that trees outlive us - trees bearing witness to multiple human life spans and not the other way around - means that when the shepherd plants a seed, either consciously or perhaps on some unconscious level, he contemplates and contributes to a future that does not involve him directly. So, it's a gesture beyond individualism. The piece is a lovely invitation to viewers to think about what their contributions to the future might be, whatever the constraints of the present. I think this is the first time I saw an animation as a child and understood that it was frames of images playing out across time. Which was probably because it was made using drawings, marks of the hand, that as a small child I was able to recognize because small children make marks. And unlike other animations more commonly broadcast that were more cartoon- like with opaque, flat colours, The Man who Planted Trees really laid bare the elements of its making - language meets the quality of the artists hand, meets time. And it was really beautiful. Process, I suppose. I just checked & it's a Canadian film production too! (loop!) The writer is Jean Giorno. And the filmmaker is Frederic Back.

The cave is generally acknowledged as the first cinema (I'm thinking of Werner Herzogs' Cave of Forgotten Dreams and how those incredible cave drawings would have become like frame animations when activated by the flicker of a live flame) but there's something so filmic about the ordinary occurrence of light filtering through the leaves of a big tree on a sunny day, and the animations it projects on to the ground. Maybe this makes trees particularly apt subjects for animation. On maybe it makes them the best animators - relaying the atmospheric particularities of the moment through layers of light & shadow. But then as you (and Daisy Hildyard) noted, they're also chronicles of deeper time and centuries- long histories through their growth rings. Pretty wild. I watched Wim Wenders Perfect Days a few months ago. I won't spoil it. It's a sort of exploration of Tokyo following a man who works as a janitor in public restrooms, a character who might ordinarily fall below the threshold of who typically warrants observation. It's a very beautiful film, rooted in ordinariness and routine. And art is threaded throughout it also. Not in the context of big galleries or cinemas, but manifested in the janitor’s personal cassette collection he has assembled with care over time that he listens to in his van throughout the day, and in the single skywards photograph he takes every day from the same place where he sits beneath the trees during his lunch break. At the very end, after the credits have rolled, the screen lights up with a shot of leaves against the sky and then appear the words: Komorebi. The Japanese word for the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. It exists only once, in that moment. The fact that words exist for phenomena in one language and not others is another lovely sign that the world registers and resonates differently across people and cultures in specific and untranslatable ways. Komorebi itself is such a lovely word- how it looks and sounds, but also in its encapsulation of something so fleeting and unique. A nice little word-shaped resistance to homogeneity. Maybe we need new words. Or maybe we just need to become better attuned to the different ways the world sends signals our way, both directly and obliquely. Like Hildyard's reading of the histories embodied in her desk’s wood grain, or what the particularity and ephemerality of a local art scene tells us about a shared there ' and ' now'. Or your piece of coral.