What's with the name?

I'm part of Mosaic. It's a little trembling aspen. It got it's DNA from Tenth. The DNA of Tenth, and now Mosaic, is: Jesus, God the Father, The Holy Spirit, God's Word, authenticity and humility. If Mosaic is a trembling aspen and not an acorn, then Tenth isn't an oak, it's another trembling aspen. That seems like a healthy thing. I'm pretty sure God wants us to see ourselves as trembling aspens. Oaks might tend to take things into their own hands.

The largest living organism on earth is a trembling aspen grove in Utah. This populous tremuloides grove covers hundreds of acres, it is possibly thousands of years old. The trembling aspen reproduces using rhizomes. A rhizome is "a horizontal plant stem with shoots above and roots below serving as a reproductive structure," it's a taproot, a sucker root, or a rootstalk—pick a word, they're all weird. The grass in your front lawn grows the same way. A lump of grass sends a root underground and then sideways and a few inches away another lump of grass pops up. A trembling aspen is sitting there all by itself and then, as if by magic, another trembling aspen pops up beside it. It isn't really magic, the first tree just needed more light, so it made another one of itself, starting underground. Every tree in a trembling aspen grove is a clone of every other tree. They are genetically identical. All the trembling aspens are connected by an enormous rhizomatous root system underground.

There is an aspen grove on either side of Highway 99 just north of Brohm lake on the way to Whistler. You can tell something is a bit weird about this stand of trees, but you might not know why at first. If you look, sort of all at once, you'll see that all of the trees have similar branching structures. They look kind of the same, in a weird way, but not really. They aren't one big tree, they're all different trees. They look similar, but different, and they all need each other. Each trembling aspen needs every other trembling aspen.

The rhizome is a two way system. The original tree isn't just supporting the offshoot and the offshoot isn't just supporting the original tree. They're both supporting each other. They both need the water and nutrients from the other. They both need the leaves of the other for photosynthesis. One of the trees was the first tree, it started the stand of trees, but it would be very difficult, if not impossible to find. It's quite happy to stand among all the other trees, being itself, quietly knowing it started this amazing stand of trembling aspens. The relationship between two trembling aspens is distinctly different from the relationship between an oak tree and an acorn.