Faces in the Trees, Watching the Forest

The faces are unmistakable. The trunks of the older trees have grown — or been carved, the image is intentionally ambiguous — into ent-like masks. Wide eyes. Open mouths. Curling tendrils that read as either bark or hair. The closest one stares directly at the viewer. A second, smaller face is half-visible behind it. The light is sepia-gold, low and raking, the way light comes through forest canopy at the hour before sunset. A small stone altar or shrine stands at the foreground edge.

The trope of sentient trees is older than Tolkien — old enough that animism is itself one of the older religious frameworks humans have produced. Ents in The Lord of the Rings drew on Norse and Anglo-Saxon traditions of the wōdwās, the wild men of the forest, who in turn drew on continental European traditions about the Erlkönig and the wood-gods of Slavic folklore. The Yakut people of Siberia have kept ritual relationships with named individual trees into the 21st century. Several Shinto shrines in Japan are organized around specific old-growth cedars considered to be the resident kami. In Madagascar, the largest baobabs have personal names.

What the image is really proposing isn't a fantasy. It's a way of looking. Forests where individual trees have been recognized as sentient — by communities that consider this question seriously — are protected better than forests where they haven't. The shrine at the foreground edge admits that the protective relationship in the picture is reciprocal. The trees watch the forest. The shrine watches the trees. Someone, occasionally, comes to leave something at the shrine.