The Maker of Metaphor and Meaning

I discovered this unpublished draft in the files at my blog from March 2020.  I'm printing it now because it may otherwise be lost and never finished.... May 2,2025

The title poem of this blog includes the line: "I, too, have reckoned time and truth (content to wonder if not think) in metaphors and meaning and endless patterns of ink." This post is about a certain kind of metaphor that I have discussed with my sister Kathy who has done extensive research on the human brain.

A typical metaphor (similar to "simile") uses an image to help describe an unrelated image. An example would be "Jesus is the rock of my salvation." The "rock" or "cornerstone" image is found throughout scripture. A simile is another example of figurative language but it uses the word "like" or "as." An example would be Psalm 1:3 which says that a man who delights in the law of the Lord "shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water..."

We can understand the implied advantages of being like a tree by a river, but what do we call a metaphor when the similarity between two very different things seems to reflect a common creator, an intelligent design that is replicated in two dissimilar things?  This may be a bit of a reach, because by definition, metaphors are not to be taken literally, and the two comparisons I'm about to describe are in fact so similar in design and appearance that this discussion may transcend literary terms and reflect a more literal reality.

Let's take that simile from Psalm 1:3 again. There are two realities inside a healthy human being that are indeed very like a tree. Until recently, we were unaware of these similar designs and functions.

The image at the left is inside our body. The image at the right is a 250-year-old oak tree in my back yard. It takes little imagination to see that the two things are like each other in structure but unlike each other in substance. One is a vascular system and the other resembles a vascular system while relying on a similar internal system for transporting fluid.

The first photograph above is of the veins and arteries of the human heart  which in turn pushes blood to the lungs and entire body. (The photo is up-side-down for effect.) In that vascular system, the function is called circulation; in the oak tree is called transpiration (not circulated but drawn up from the roots in the ground).

A similar "branch" structure appears when brain cells grow in a system of dendrites from one common "trunk" into ever-smaller bifercating "branches."

The third photo shows dendrites in the brain. The bottom photo is another oak tree.
 When scripture talks about the renewing of your mind, it is not figurative language. The process of transforming the mind--renewing it--is a literal physical "growing" of dendrites, branches from branches.

Here is the reason these images have been on my mind this week...