This is beautiful and moving to me in a way that is hard to express easily. Part of it is probably the sheer tweeness (not using that term disparagingly) of wr

This is beautiful and moving to me in a way that is hard to express easily. Part of it is probably the sheer tweeness (not using that term disparagingly) of writing a love letter to a tree. I'm sure the samples in the article were pretty much the top of the barrel -- and I pray for the poor oaks which inevitably received a bunch of obscenities [^1]. But still, people are taking time out of their day to email the trees in their city. I'm sitting here thinking about how this could be generalized into a mechanism of engaging with the world around us, which is possibly defeating the point; this is great more for the emergent gameplay of it (to steal a metaphor) than anything, and I think some weird startup that let you tweet your river would kind of rob the whole exercise of its innocence. The Internet (or maybe technology in general, as if the two have a meaningful difference at this point) is so overwhelmingly used as a vehicle to accelerate maturity, to make us more jaded and cynical and disconnected. There's something great about this doing the opposite -- a glorified SMTP server letting us be more childlike, more honest and engaged in the world around us. [^1]: There's, like, a 30% chance that there now exists someone in this world who has sent a dick pic to a tree.