The sun was hanging above the trees. It did not yet want to sink into its slumber, but it was too weary to stand at the sky’s peak. It highlighted the rippling emerald sea in front of me with a soft gold. They really are remarkable, the vivid hues of pine and sage captured by the grasses that no earthly artist can recreate. These were the things I pondered as I skimmed down the trail. I did not pause to give them much thought; the sun would soon tire and descend to its raven palate, and I wasn’t to be out at night.

Finally I came to the tree, my tree. It was not flaunting the fluorescent greenery or silver wood of a younger tree, but I knew its rough boughs had the stoutness of iron beams. I rooted my foot to a knob at its base and began my climb. My hands roughly molded to the bark as I lifted myself through its branches. I paused. I was a branch beneath the highest I had dared to perch. Cautiously I reached for a higher branch. As I pulled up, my heart hammered wildly, but I dared not shake too violently; I glanced down and saw a very ominous, very jagged broken branch prodding casually into my gut. At last, ever more carefully, I hauled myself onto the final branch.
I was now at tree top level. The limbs of neighboring trees reached up with little hands that grazed the sky. I looked at the trail below. The red-brown earth had spread out, the scattered shrubbery making it a startling picture. I sat gazing a little longer as the sky bled its rosy dusk colors. Suddenly, with a surge of inspiration, I leapt to a higher, thinner branch. It complained, waving madly, under my bulk but held. Without pausing I pulled myself even further up.
At last I could go no higher. I sat trembling in the fork of the topmost branches. Once I was stable, I looked out at the trees around me. The sight was breathtaking; the sun, now blearily glowing from beneath the horizon, cast a veil of worn copper from the wispy clouds, high in the sky, to the earthen veins, jutting from the ground. A soft word from the wind made the gilded tree tops ripple in a way seen only at sea. On the landscape below the numerous boughs created a dappled pattern of gray shade to bronze light on the ground that danced as the leaves shifted. As the wind continued to murmur softly, I marveled that in all the countless times I had been through the wood, I had never seen this before. It had been here all along, something beautiful, something unique, something new just waiting for someone to abandon their doubts and go a branch higher.