I spend a lot of time looking at trees. My favorite times are when there is a strong wind blowing them about—usually I prefer this in the winter, as I am greatly averse to temperatures above 45F or so, but the milder days of spring and fall, or even summer on the odd occasion, also provide something else that is quite special. Two things, really: the one is the sound of the wind in the trees (there is a specific, if not very stilted, word for this: psithurism; I am a fan but I can't bring myself to use it with any regularity) which is exquisite beyond description. The other: the maddening complexity of the leaves as they dance and shudder in the wind.

There is something else that has recently been more plaguing than intriguing, though, which is the following. 

It is the usual nature of a gust of wind striking trees to blow the limbs and leaves in the direction that the wind is traveling, showing, as it were, that the trees are united in their three hundred million-year stand against the elements. After the gust subsides, each individual tree begins its own, odd oscillatory quivering in its return to rest, then each limb, then each leaf—each in its own way, none of which is like another; none of which is like any that ever have been or will be. The shaking and dancing of each leaf is unique to its individual state—its properties and those of its surroundings, such as its size, its stiffness, the temperature and pressure of the air, and so on. It is, as I said, complex to the point where I find myself wholly overwhelmed by the spectacle of it all, let alone in its contemplation. I try not to envision the entirety of the world in this procession, much less all of the world throughout the eons, or, God forbid, all of the cosmos from the Beginning to the present, lest my mind finally take leave of this fleshsuit before my work is done.

The above description is in most ways obvious. My dwelling on it is just a quirk of my temperament. Another quirk, though, is my growing obsession with (and fear of?) the above description happening... out of order. That is, I find myself envisioning—and growing anxious and terrified of—a time when the wind rises and, instead of the whole of the trees being blown in the direction of the wind, united as one, that each individual leaf on each branch of each tree shudders on its own, each unlike any of the others—until the wind subsides, and the long-range correlation of the system returns: the limbs join in collective bending, and then the trees themselves "blow" together as one in the direction of the wind, finally coming to rest thereafter.

The vision of the wind stochastically scattering the behavior of the leaves in a way that is so dissonant with the common nature of the wind is terrifying. And what is even more terrifying is such a queer event reorganizing thereafter into an emergent order that should be impossible. Not only that, but it gives the impression, being usually the initial result of a gust of wind, that the tree itself is the one forcing the windblown-like emergent state. 

I should think that the only thing more frightening would be the rows of flowers in one's yard suddenly bursting into song...