With a whip of wind and a crack of great limbs a second missive was sent. The first had come a week earlier, on the other side of the country, with the roar of a jet engine outside my window as I witnessed the first large tree fall to the ground. For quite a while, wind has always set me on edge. Only this year have I really started listening to trees. I still don’t exactly understand them, but when two large ancient beasts drop themselves in my path, I feel the need to pay attention. Derrick Jensen gave me some subtle hints at how to listen to trees, outside the boxes of conventional language. Later this year I had the pleasure of meeting Julia Butterfly Hill. In the past few months, I have started to make an effort to listen.
There is no right or wrong here. It is open to interpretation. Communicating and listening with any other is by nature very personal. My mother says wind is natural, beautiful and cleansing. I agree, but for me it is also nerve-wracking.
I used to think that flying was exciting and interesting, the ideal cosmopolitan experience. Now I can only think of the mistrust and invasion of privacy at checkpoints, the needless risk of separating oneself from their own perfect place in the earth, and the gallons of jetfuel poured right into the ozone. Jet lag was always talked about something that was either envied (means you’re a real “jet-setter”) or curable. But here I am at 7 a.m. after being awake for two hours and listening to the way jet lag feels. Moving along the surface of the earth we adjust to the space and it makes way for us. Plucked from the surface in a sterile mechanized way doesn’t feel right. Jet lag is the result of being separated from one’s place on the earth. It is separation of mind, body and spirit all trying to catch up with one another, all trying to fit back into the world that welcomes them.
Trees were that way too. When I was young they started out for me as brown thick stuff. Things that needed to be cleared to make way for progress. Warnings of woods as dangerous places that housed nefarious humans and wild animals. They had no names other than “trees, bushes and grass”. I returned to my hometown to see the new shopping mall built on what used to be a golf course, and before that, an Indian burial ground. There are large stretches of land now, where there are no trees. And isolated patches between construction sites where I can count the number of trees, where before I couldn’t see through them. And along roadsides there were beautiful tall brown grasses with tassles at the top. What are they called I wonder?
I watched as our blue jay landed on the broken limb that pointed skyward and cocked his head blinking sideways at the mess of cedar branches. I watched as the crane lowered the broken limb and brushed it against the giant doug fir that was the cedar’s companion for all these years. Wind, trees, jet planes. Is this type of listening simply an interpretation of the facts? Am I just a gloomy onlooker? I do know what feels right and what doesn’t. I am still listening.
