Persistence without audience.
These trees stand on the Isle of Mull, photographed in 2024. The island sits off the west coast of Scotland, facing the Atlantic — a place where the weather arrives without apology and the landscape offers no particular comfort to anything trying to grow in it.
Hermann Hesse, writing in Wandering in 1920, observed that he revered trees most when they stood alone. Not like hermits, he said — not retreating from life out of weakness — but like great solitary men. Like Beethoven. Like Nietzsche. Struggling with all their force to fulfil themselves according to their own laws.
These trees are not a family. They are not sheltered. They have been shaped by every wind that found this hillside, on an island that offers nothing back, and they have remained.
There is no audience for this endurance. No record of how long they have held their position. They simply continue — bent by pressure, rooted in ground that asks nothing of them and gives very little.
Most of what holds in life does so in exactly this way. That is not a tragedy. It may be the only kind of holding that means anything.
— Syl Ojalla · The Forum Internum