About

On the morning of May 1, 2015, I strung some prayer flags about forty feet up in a maple tree on a Vermont hillside, and resolved to climb to this perch every day through the end of summer.

I climbed on sunny mornings up through caverns of green; in torrential afternoon rains; at twilight as woodcocks and barred owls called across a meadow full of fireflies; and by touch alone in the blackness of night.  

Summer ended and fall was even more beautiful–hills on fire in the setting sun–so I kept on climbing.  Until the winter solstice, I told myself.  With winter came intense blue skies, an ice storm or two, and a tree full of wind.  I kept on climbing, through to the end of the year, and into the next, and every day for four years.

Writing and photography became two of the ways I experienced being in the tree.  This creative relation to the tree became as vital as climbing itself. 

I chose ‘woodwaterstone’ as the address for this site when it struck me that the practice of balancing stones in the meadow involves a meditation in movement very like that of climbing the tree.  And the properties and textures of stone offer a bracing counterpoint to the organic branchings of wood.  On days when I am lucky enough, I achieve a state of flow in one practice or the other: hence, water.

This project is an exercise in quiet.  I am not rafting down the Amazon, or rappelling cliffs, or trekking around the Annapurnas.  I am not undertaking the pilgrimage to Santiago, or following Basho’s narrow road to the deep north (more’s the pity).  I am climbing a very ordinary maple tree—the same ordinary maple tree—day after day after day.  The practice of climbing is the practice of seeing what is marvelous about a world so familiar we walk by it every day without noticing.  It requires and fosters the cultivation of wonder.  And it turns out that what is tiny and ordinary unfolds into a magisterium of parts, and each of those parts in turn contains a cosmos.  If there is, as William Blake wrote, a universe in a grain of sand, there are countless more in a tree.  The more you look, the more there is to see; and the more you climb, the more pathways emerge:   

Art project.  Spiritual practice.  Celebration of playfulness.  Adrenaline-inducing physical adventure.  The search for a deeper and more intimate connection with the natural world.

And it turns out there is nothing better than sitting thirty or forty feet up in a tree with your daughters, like koala bears, snapping goofy pictures and talking about life. 

The first year is presented as a traditional forward-reading narrative.  The years since appear in blog format.  The galleries offer a visual meditation on the tree and its countless elements and seasons.  

I climb, and these are the fruits.  I hope they convey something of the experience of being in a tree every day.  Enjoy!

—Jared Jenisch

[This project ended in June of 2019, when I moved away from my tree.]