“Eisa asked me while I was reading it to him. ‘Do trees feel? Do trees talk?’. Do they really? My answer was…..”
This book made me cry. I bought this for a bunch of kids who happens to be my Eisa’s classmates, a bunch of beautifully naughty toddlers. The name of the book is ‘The Giving Tree- a picture book written and illustrated by Shel Silverstein. I was unaware of such a writer most probably because of my obscurity towards picture books.
My prejudice was that it is a huge waste to leave space for illustrations when the words are more powerful in illustrating the ideas in mind than the illustration itself. But I was wrong. The illustrations in this book convey ideas that its words couldn’t. It conveyed the long old relationship between man and tree. This book is relevant in this world where apples and oranges become just a product of supermarkets, where no one relates them to a tree, where a trunk is a just raw material for furniture’s, where leaves are just garbage. Eisa asked me while I was reading it to him. ‘Do trees feel? Do trees talk?’. Do they really? My answer was Yes they feel and they talk, their talks are much informative than most of our talks. If we want to understand them we must open our hearts. A tree with its mere presence itself talks about the beauty and magnificence of its Creator. And about the mercy of our creator upon us because no tree needs a single one among us to survive but we all need them vitally. Do they not talk to us about the direction and speed of the wind, whether the wind is a breeze or a zephyr or a gale or a gust or a twister…. They tell us about the changing seasons by their leaves, flowers and fruits. Even they cry out to the world about natural disasters like earthquake, tornado, tsunami etc. but we are deaf and blind in our hearts to not hear these cries. Last but not least it talks about the disasters we made on earth …for this one I’m sure that we have been hearing it for a long time but we haven't been listening.
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