...I don't know enough biology to infer any more of the influences that could account for the unique shape of each one. It is ... interesting to contemplate the sameness and the difference between elements of any one species as embodying both perfection and roughness, perceived order and disobedience, in the one type of thing, wherever one looks (in a forest).

This is something we have yet to achieve in things artificial but thank goodness the advent of digital computing has made it possible, at last, to leave mechanical sameness to history and to look forward to a future in which things made industrially, and digitally, can be as diverse as we wish (as was the case in craftwork but for different reasons).

As I lay on the ground in that piece of forest I could see some young beech trees swaying in the wind. This reminded me of a storm in a forest when Edwin Schlossberg showed me how to listen to the crackling sounds inside treetrunks in motion. So I got up to press my ear to the smooth bark of a beech tree - and yes, I could hear this music again, the explosive inner song of the trees bending under strain. But today it is quieter, the wind being more a breeze than a storm.

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