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Sivan Levi: Shade vs. Sun




Daring to dream, daring to find that which it needs the most, but he is barred from it by the dark. An intrepid seed, young in stature but of wise spirit, started life not knowing of light. Light is a constant wave moving through the air of our world, part visible, part invisible. Those who can’t find the light are said to be lost. But for those who try, and succeed in finding it, the light is everything.


This little seed is destined to become a grand tree. Many seeds can rise to great height, but only if they find the light and escape the darkness. It has no sense where its goal is, no sense of which way is up, just the drive to grow. The ground it resides in is an alien place, dark and full of terrors. The young one can’t see them and for the unwary, these predators defeat all possibility of moving forward. These microscopic merchants of death gather and prey on any seed unfortunate to be in their path. The seed courageously spreads out its roots and pushes out a small stem like a periscope in a lake of dirt. Wind rushes by. It’s the first time the youngster has felt this invisible force of nature. That’s not all it notices. All around it are massive pillars of green and brown towering over it. The seed is intimidated, but it follows its course and spreads his first leaves.


These leaves are what all plants require to collect light for photosynthesis, that wondrous process that gives our chlorophyll crusader the power to nourish itself in a way animals cannot. Where is it though? Where is that light? The green of the ceiling masks yellow, blue and white. The sight is beautiful, a mosaic of nature, but it’s not enough for our seedling, who can’t understand grandeur. It keeps trying get over a shrub that’s beside it. The shrub tells it fruitlessly to halt its advances, but day after day the seedling grows, sprouting more leaves, inch by precious inch. By incident, the shrub is removed of leaves by a passing herbivore of great height. A rack of antlers is visible to the seedling, but he continues to grow unnoticed. Then, the game changes for better and worse all at once.


The season of Fall has started to earn its name. The seedling hasn’t graduated to the next stage yet and the temperature is falling along with the leaves of the competition. It’s first encounter with light, so close and yet so far, is not the way the plant-to-be imagined it. For one thing, this isn’t the season for growing, it’s the season for dormancy. It may only be a moment, but the seedling has had a taste of what light is all about, and now it wants more. Unfortunately, it’s going to have to wait. The first leaves he ever had now fall to the floor on the breeze. Meanwhile, the leaves of other plants have littered the ground, covering the seedling and future hopefuls waiting in the soil. Then the blue and yellow of the unreachable ceiling is blown aside by white and grey. Winter is coming.The light is gone. The white suddenly starts falling downward and covers the leaf litter and the young plants underneath the leaf litter. Plant life is suspended.


The light remains elusive during the coldest time of the year. With no alternative, our seedling has endure the elements. It can’t go up, but its roots take on the hard job of tracking down and taking in nutrients from down below. The alien soil world the seed never wanted to go back to now provides sustenance for the next three months. The grey of the ceiling above the seedling becomes darker and more white falls down to the ground. Spring can’t come any sooner. Warm breezes now fill the air and the white melts away revealing the brown leaves that still cover the floor of the forest.


Our young plant then frustrates itself with re-growing leaves and growing its stem a bit more. Spring is a time for competition. The light’s come back, but then is gone again as the green canopy is restored. The seedling finally gets some coating over its stem. It can handle more elements now, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it has to punch through the leaf litter and compete with the enormous trees for light. While our seedling tries desperately to get ahead of the competition, other youngsters try growing in his shadow. Luckily, some slimy locals clean up the mess. Wriggly pink masses move slowly along the forest floor after sheltering underneath the soil. It turns out that they have an appetite for our seedling’s obstacle. The dead leaves are dragged under the soil and turned into nutrients for the living greenery.

By the beginning of Summer, the seedling has earned the right to be called a sapling. As part of that privilege, he gets to branch out, grow tall and increase his odds of survival. The strange four-legged herbivore may come by once or twice, and may eat a few leaves, but the sapling doesn’t panic. It’s got leaves to spare and buds are at the ready to replace those it lost. But he knows it’s out there, that light that continues to elude him.

On the inside, the sapling is keeping a record, a record of rings. They form with each passing year and indicate great events like high growth periods and harsh moments of suspenseful weather. The path is still clear. Our plant must keep moving upward, searching for the light that hangs in its memory bank no matter what. One day, it notices a tiny red flower. She sprouted not too far from his new trunk. Part of her lies in shadow, the other in a spot of light he can’t reach. The light half is losing color and turning brown while the shadow half is more alive. It turns out this particular flower likes shade more than light. Why may that be so? Could it be that she is afraid of what the light may do to her delicate form? Our sapling promises to keep growing to provide more and more shade for its smaller neighbor. Branches fall, leaves die and he still pushes on like a determined player in the never-ending light-catching game.


It has been a long, hard and brutal road, but finally, he’s made it. The sapling is now a tree, standing proudly amongst its fellow plants in the forest. They used to look down on him, but not anymore. The little flower cannot hope to reach his height, but is instead content with the notion that her neighbor will provide all the shade she needs to keep the light out. The tree, meanwhile, has an abundant supply of light, keeping it going for many more years. Some trees collapse around it, others are just starting to get their lives in order. Our tree finally has its own clear view of the world and the unreachable ceiling that is the blue sky. The yellow sun shines down upon it, making its leaves spread out for joy. White clouds pass by on their quiet way, floating on the wind. The tree never notices what’s beneath it’s branches, not even a two-legged animal looking up at it. Perhaps, it’s admiring its splendor, observing its every detail, or marveling at the trees way of making other living things feel small.


Perhaps it’s also inevitable that the tree finds solace at the end of its life. Its use for light is spent and the leaves it used to gather it fall once more, never to be replaced again. It’s roots have spread out so wide that the soil world is almost taken over by them, yet they now stop functioning as there is no more work to be done. Those nutrients that its dead leaves brought to the soil to picked up and reused are now saved for other plants to feed on. It might be in this moment that the giant reflects on its long arduous journey. From the little seed, to the eager sprout, to the frustrated sapling, it persevered. It may have been pushy, a bit kind, and a little ambitious in pursuing that light every plant dreams of finding once in their life, but like all other trees, and indeed all other plants, one thing it hasn’t been is still.

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