Three fields from my house is a fallen oak. This vast exposed root it all that's left of its hundreds of years of bending in storms, drinking up rain, reaching up to spring sun, drying out in mid-summer heat, sending out thousands of leaves every spring, letting go every autumn, feeling the old leaves rejoining it slowly through the soil, dropping the branch that lightning struck, resisting the beetles and the woodpecker that followed them, reaching out to its companion - an oak its equal in size just along the field path, sharing knowledge and maybe joy, knowing this is the year to make acorns and smother the ground in them, feeling a new tree emerge and start to talk through its roots, hearing the buzz of thousands of insects, the craak of the crows in its top, and finally, very slowly, coming to an end.
This is the oak I used to pass, and it's still glorious in its complexity, its strength and its uniqueness.
One day I want to be an oak.
PS The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben changed my understanding of oaks and all other trees for ever.
PPS Van Gogh definitely looked long and hard at a dead oak root.
