Part 1:
Lately I have been looking up at the trees. I have always done this—looking up to see if the tops were visible—if they were blowing in the wind or just standing there, waiting.
Trees have always been a friend to me. I grew up around them. Under them. On them. They protected me. As a child I would run off into the woods that surrounded my home and I would disappear for hours under the canopy of the forest. I felt safe in the clutches of the branches. I could freely sprawl out across their roots as my imagination churned, an adventure unfolding in my head as some story of why I was there took shape.
They watched over me as I played. And they took me to other worlds.
But they kept me grounded here in the present on this earth in my own human body. And as I grew, my relationship with them grew. My awareness of the trees changed and matured.
Now that I am older, I have begun to work with the flesh of the tree, shaping it’s fibrous body into whatever I desire. There is something deeply intimate, sacred if you will, about stripping away flecks of wood to reveal a hidden beauty. It is both wonderful and horrible at the same time. A troubling duality: to maim a thing that is already beautiful enough in its own right; a true natural beauty. To manipulate it in a way that appeases my desires as if to say, “Tree, you beautiful, wonderful, natural thing, you exist for me, and for me alone,” is horrible, really. It certainly maintains the notion that humans belong at the center of it all.
But I can at least reconcile and validate my obsession by strictly using only wood that would otherwise go to waste or rot. Which I guess helps me sleep at night. Even still, the wood that goes to rot serves a purpose within the forest where it fell. I clearly recognize my hypocrisy here. I own it, don’t worry.
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Part 2:
The smell of trees, no matter the season, is one that moves me to other times. Back to those days of naive youth when I would escape to the dense, deciduous Illinois forests to play and dream. In the woods, the smells perpetually change with the passing of time like some passive, ethereal clock tower whose hands slowly move onward with no end in site, and our only glimpse of this keeper of time is through our noses.
And so it goes on, and each season brings with it a different aroma—no two alike.
In autumn it is the sweet smell of musky rot. Rich with the decaying sugars from the saturated leaves — the air is thick with it. The long days of summer are just a memory now, buried deep under the fallen leaves and blown away on the winds of the changing season. In their place is the promise of decay. But it is not all melancholic—no—this decay catalyzes new life if we only wait long enough and look for it when it comes, and nurture it when it does.
Decay can be that way sometimes. As things fall away, little symphonies of externalities flourish in the holes left behind. But sometimes we must wait.
And so as we wait, winter descends upon the forest, and it is bitter. It can be unrelenting if we let it, and the absence of smell is almost overpowering. It is the absence of life. The trees have withdrawn into themselves, rationing their stores for spring. In the absence there is room left for you to leave your own scent under the trees. Your own bit of life as you wait for life to return. In the woods in winter, I leave only the smell of my breath as it passes through a scarf wrapped around my neck.
And then spring breaks through the frozen ground fresh and new, melting away the ice of winter, shaking of the last bits of snow. Creation breathes again into the waking forest. The lungs of the earth sigh deeply for the first time after waking from their long winter’s nap. Everywhere life is opening up again, unfurling along the ground, budding from the branches, slowly but steadily descending upon the wood. The soil pulses with tiny universes too small for the eye to see. But I know they are there. I can feel them when I dig my hands deep into the soil, trapping it under my fingernails. The universes are there.
Then finally summer. The climax. The crescendo of life in the woods. The heated air melds the smells of the forest together. Trees, and all that they foster and nourish, harmoniously together like a warm pond of water lapping at it’s edges in constant, uneven waves, delicately suspend the smell of summer just above all that is in the forest. The scented waves slowly ripple across the leaves, always moving outward. Always moving onward. Always beginning again.
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Part 3:
The trees are the sentinels of the forest. They keep watch over the woods, and all that inhabit it.
Lately I have been looking up at the trees. But where there was once a childhood-naive-joy, there is now a cavernous sorrow that has welled up from deep within. I don’t know when it started. Maybe when my curiosity drove me out of the dark and into the light of understanding. Understanding that we are slowly killing everything that the trees watch over. Including ourselves and the trees, too.
Death has always been a part of the cycle. But what we are doing now is not normal. It is not natural.
I think I feel shame when I look at them now.
The trees know what we have done, what we are doing, what we will continue to do. They have always known. The follies of progress are nothing new to the stoic watchers of the wood.
If only they could speak. Would they cry out to us? Would they condemn us? Offer us forgiveness? Guidance? Understanding? I cannot say.
If I were a tree I would ask to be left alone. Too long has the hand of humanity greedily reached into the forest to take what does not belong to us. Too long have we felt entitled to shape the world we inhabit. To rape, pillage, plunder, burn, turn, desecrate, dismantle what has existed long before we ever walked this earth. In the name of civilization, society, church or state we have taken what has so graciously existed for eons before us. A gift—the natural world—bequeathed to us and all the living and nonliving inhabits of this earth— that we have tarnished so deeply. Because we think it is ours and ours alone. Meant for us. We are at the center of it.
I am not sure if it has always been this way—humanity’s needless reach for more. Depending on what you ask of whom, and which pundit you dig up from the sludge of contemporary science, politics, or economics, you will probably find that to some degree it has been. Or you might find the opposite to be true— that it has not always been this way. That it is contemporary human thought that has driven us to the wasteland of existence we now call modern life—modern, western society.
The trap of progress has gotten us here. Humans have always sought to leave the darkness of where they currently reside. But somewhere along the way we sacrificed a part of ourselves to this quest for better light. Somewhere along the way the script was rewritten and we consented to a new way of doing things. One that encourages—even glorifies— complexity over simplicity because complexity takes science, research-and-development, innovation, creativity, cunningness. It takes schools of thought and schools of higher education. It takes rules, regulations, and folks to enforce them. It takes authority and uniforms to exercise it. Whether the uniform is a suit and tie; robes and cross; or fatigues and rifle, the end game is the same: fall in line and do not get in the way of the forward march of progress. The smokey, smog-ridden, murky water-filled, barren-land-ridden path of progress. Of salvation.
Somewhere along the way, we turned our backs on nature. And on ourselves. We have since neglected our place within the wild world. We have erected a barrier between nature and the society we have built. Our animal-selves that belong amongst the natural cycles we are so keen to disrupt and redistribute for our own amassing of material wealth have been lost along this road of progress. And I think some of us feel it. Maybe we all do, at some level, feel the loss of ourselves. But maybe that’s what medicine is for, after all.
Now I am not a Romantic—I do not wish to return to where we have been. I acknowledge and understand the necessity for humans to move forward. But I also don’t romanticize about the future either. There is nothing grand waiting for us with the path we are taking. The Old Ways have their use, I think. They have their importance. It seems that often we concentrate so heavily on reinventing the wheel that we neglect to acknowledge that simple ways of doing things are sometimes best.
There is sacrifice, yes. Embracing the ways of long-forgotten skills and ways of life seems to take nothing but sacrifice. But I can think of no more worthy sacrifice than a bit of comfort for the preservation of a natural system free (or as free as it can be) from the toxic coal-black hand of humanity.
Lately I find myself empathetic to the notion of thoughtful objection to unchecked growth, advancement and innovation specifically within the realms of technological systems, economic systems and parallel; societal systems. I can almost hear the cacophony of jeers chanting, “Luddite!” But if you sit back and really take a look at things, I mean really look, can you sit there and tell me that where we have gotten to is really worth the desecration we have caused? The ecocide we continue to bring down upon this miracle of a planet we have been lucky enough to call home?
For me the answer is a harsh “NO!” Obviously it’s a complex problem. With manifestations of conflict beyond the oversimplified stream of consciousness that I have just spewed forth supplying only my limited and narrow view on the way things are and how they got to be such. But still, I thoughtfully and peacefully object.
I don’t really know where this line of thinking will take me, hopefully back to the woods where I grew up. Hopefully to a nice spot beneath an old White Oak where I can just sit and look up at the trees.