If there ever was an Ent

It was a chilly Saturday morning some few months ago when I went to campus with my camera to catch the cadets jogging. I still can't fall out of bed early enough to join them, but I could at least snap pictures. So I was walking along the Academic Oval, knowing they'd pass by soon enough, when I saw this in the Sunken Garden, on the dry side of the lagoon and that mysteriously abandoned-looking (and graffiti-decorated) ampitheatre.

A tree, grown and broken and overgrown in just the right ways... to make an unmistakable figure. Not quite the gnarled old things of Tolkien's story, this might count as a younger Ent, looking east to the dawn and frozen mid-stride when I caught it. Its right arm, branches still growing and full of leaves.

Even with all the trees here, you don't see something like this pretty often. And I was just as sure that it would disappear or change, maybe in weeks, maybe in days. Trees around here, as massive and ancient as they are, are always changing. Leaves and branches growing and falling. The occasional typhoon bending all the smaller ones in one direction or another. Back in 2007, just after a powerful typhoon, so many old trees fell over, roots pulled out of the earth with soggy clods of dirt trapped here and there. Now, the effect is a couple of old logs almost parallel with the earth, from which multitudes of younger branches and trunks now grow.

That's one of the things I love about this place. Around here, you don't see a good clump of woods, no matter how scrawny and bare the trees are - you don't see it get torn up and replaced with a cookie cutter subdivision with grass thats just a penny better than astro-turf and the 'trees' in their lawns are just little ten year old saplings and everything else is cut and trimmed and tamed into an artificial 'perfection'. Around here, nature is allowed to grow. It grows everywhere, in the empty lots, in the nooks and cracks of houses and everywhere. Around here, a clump of trees is not a nuisance but rather retains the mystery it had back in the days of fairy tales. It grows, to offer shade and fruit to strangers, a haven for birds to twitter about in, and maybe a snarky and sticky-sweet response to whatever flashy vehicle tries to park beneath it. And if a storm blows it down, so long as it ain't wreckin' the street or a house, they leave it be. They let it grow. They let it recover. Until it gives shade and fruit and shelter all over again.

If there's any place you'll find an Ent today, or the fairy-tale wonders of Middle Earth, its probably here in the Philippines. At least thats the view from where I stand.