Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.
So imagine you're a photographer living near the Southern shore of Lake Vättern in Sweden,
On your commute to work each day, you pass a tree in a lakeshore park,
that looks kind of like a huge stalk of broccoli,
and the Broccoli Tree always makes you smile,
there's just something about a single tree in an otherwise empty landscape,
something that makes farmers harvest around them and
U2 put them on album covers.
And then one day, in the spring of 2013, you take a picture of the Broccoli Tree on your iPhone camera
And post it to Instagram. There's a bit of dirt on your lens,
It's certainly not the fanciest picture you've ever taken, but people like it.
43 people in fact.
Over the next few months, you upload a few more photographs of the Broccoli Tree,
The pictures aren't only about the tree, but also about the life happening around it.
A bird in the sky, a jogger, a happy couple,
In November, you post a picture of the tree with a caption
saying that you are reminded of an old quote, "You don't take a picture, you make a picture."
That one gets 107 likes.
By April of 2014, 11 months into the project,
you're posting a few pictures of the Broccoli Tree every week,
and you decide to give it it's own Instagram. The tree becomes the focus of your creative life,
You photograph it through the seasons and rain and snow and sunshine,
capturing the people who line the beach for the brief and glorious Swedish summer,
luxuriating in the Broccoli Tree's shade.
Your audience grows into the thousands. In the summer of 2015, you have
an exhibition of your Broccoli Tree photographs, at the Broccoli Tree.
And your pictures keep getting better as the project becomes more popular.
The Broccoli Tree calendar is a success, and people all over the world buy Broccoli Tree prints for their homes.
By 2016, the Broccoli Tree project is so successful that the Broccoli Tree is becoming, like, famous.
People visit it as a tourist destination, and you find yourself in the surreal position of
photographing the Broccoli Tree, while people are photographing themselves with the Broccoli Tree.
Type "the broccoli tree" into Google Maps,
and you're taken there immediately. You can even street view it.
Sure, by sharing the Broccoli Tree's so widely it has come to belong less to you and your close friends,
but it's amazing that so many people are seeing your photographs,
and that what started as you looking at a tree on your commute,
has become this huge deal.
The Broccoli Tree now has over 27 thousand followers on Instagram,
Which means that you are the photographic force behind the social internet's
single most famous tree.
And then...
On September 27th, 2017, you go to photograph the tree in the morning,
but something is different.
Upon close examination, it becomes obvious.
In a furious and heartbroken Instagram post you write,
"You absolutely cannot un-saw a tree."
And indeed, the damage prove irreversible.
A few days later, its gone.
The Broccoli Tree, once your Broccoli Tree, is no more.
You loved something, you shared it. Many people loved it too.
And then one or a few people decided to cut it down.
Given enough time, such people will always cut down such trees.
The Joshua tree from that U2 album cover, gone.
The sacred golden spruce tree in British Columbia, gone.
The location of the oldest tree in the world,
a five-thousand-year-old bristle cone pine somewhere in California
is kept secret. Because otherwise, we all know what would happen.
To share something is to risk losing it. Especially in a world where sharing occurs at
tremendous scale, and where everyone seems to want to be noticed,
even if only for cutting down a beloved tree.
If you'd never photographed the Broccoli Tree,
it might still be there for you to see on your commute everyday.
It might still provide shade to the real people
who live with you on the southern bank of that lake.
But then again, the far away people who loved your pictures of the Broccoli Tree were real too.
They took shelter under it's canopy as well, even if only virtually.
And the truth is, if we hoard and hide what we love,
we can still lose it.
Only then, we're alone in the loss.
You can't un-saw a tree, but you can't un-see one either.
The Broccoli Tree is gone, but it's beauty survives.
Hank, I'll see you on Friday.