As those who have visited The School of Life will know, we are rather partial to trees. And so it seems are the editors of Hamish Hamilton’s new online journal Five Dials which has just released its second issue, downloadable here. Five Dials isn’t strictly themed: ‘our themes, like rotting oak, break down, crumble and biodegrade halfway through each planned issue’ they admit. But the new issue features articles by the late Roger Deakin, Robert McFarlane and Jay Griffiths among others, so one could say it has more than a hint of the natural world about it.
'Everywhere in the world, people have associated tree and thought, idea and forest,’ Griffiths writes in her beautiful article Ancient Trees, Ancient Knowledge. ‘For indigenous people everywhere, nature is an enlargement of your mind, and your sense of kin - your social mind. The Malo people of northern Bangladesh used to have a custom of marrying a girl to a tree and a boy to the river, before their marriage to each other. For the Karen in the forests of northern Thailand, the umbilical cord of a baby would be tied to a tree; the spirit of the child dwelt there, and to harm the tree would be to harm the child; the ritual thus intricately linked person to tree.' Read the rest of the article here.
Sophie Howarth is Director of The School of Life.
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