Twitter glimpses the blazing wonder of a lightning-struck tree, turns it into a dumb meme
A couple of days ago, @sofain shared a short video of a tree that had been struck by lightning on Twitter. It’s an incredible sight. A huge gash runs down the trunk and inside it’s hollowed out and filled with flames. The clip shows a stunning, dangerous phenomenon that speaks to the power and terrific beauty of nature. It’s the kind of thing that when watched, looping over and over, inspires thoughts on our place as just one more species in a global ecosystem defined by natural powers ultimately apathetic to our greatest hopes and desires; our deepest thoughts and individual concerns.
It has now, of course, also become a meme best exemplified by tweets that say stuff like “Me, pretending to be ok” or make reference to having brutal diarrhea.
The burning tree, on the internet, cannot be just a tree, after all. It has to stand in for emotional turmoil…