Trees of Life

I write today for three trees that are gone now, hacked up by men with chainsaws.  I see you fallen ones on the median strip of pavement, your remains chopped into pieces.  I have been holding my breathe for a long while waiting for this day to come.  The day the construction would start in front of my building.  I counted 80 trees-trees for buses- that will be cut down.  Is this a fair exchange?  Is this progress?

I weep for each of your leaves and for the men who are "just doin' my job mam."

Did you three trees know I noticed you?  You will be missed, I promise.  I was aware of your plant medicine for the city, helping to purify the toxic fumes from all the vehicles that passed by you each day.* I could tell you suffered and were not so healthy with all the heat and exhaust coming your way.  You will be missed for your leaves changing colors and for the beauty you brought to this place.  I did think about chaining myself to one of you but frankly, I didn't think I could stomach that much toxicity and noise on the street for long and I knew it wouldn't do any good.  The chainsaws and the men would come anyway and cut you down to the ground.  Men in hard hats and fluorescent colored vests from Star Paving (the faded name on their pickup trucks) did you in today, but really who's to blame?

"Just doin' my job mam...mouths to feed."

The chainsaw sounds again and again, as the hard hat men cut each of your branches, grates on my nerves as it destroys you limb from limb.  I make a small offering to you three trees as the backhoe loader passes me by, may you rest in peace.

Let's pull up more oil for petroleum from the ground and spread it around.

Let's frack some more and see what we can explore.

Let's ignore the indigenous tribes as they stand to protect their land and water from the Dakota Access Pipeline.  Let's pull up more oil for petroleum from the ground and spread it around.

My first thought was to leave this cynical poem as the closing here but I thought better about it after I came upon a few paragraphs from Peter London in his book, Drawing Closer to Nature.  If only we took action with a conscious effort toward the interconnectedness of all life in nature as he describes here:

I bring my ax and saw with me to the tree I have chosen to fell, and lay them down away from the tree.  Then I sit a distance from the tree, where I can see it in its entirety.  I bring its vision into me, like a photographer's camera taking into its body the light of that tree. Something terrible and something wonderful is about to happen.  Leaving my axe and my saw, I approach the tree, walking up to it, touching it, feeling its taut and sinewy trunk, its skin, how it springs from the earth, how its limbs reach for the light, the neighborhood it lives in, the neighbors.

And then he prays for this friend, asking for forgiveness, he makes a medicine wheel around the tree noting the path of the sun and the four directions before he carries out his task. 

***

Some months later, after I post these words, I am reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.  She tells the story of her friend and teacher, indigenous basketmaker, John Pigeon.  He is from a lineage of basket makers from the Potawatomi tribe, she writes: Traditional harvesters recognize the individuality of each tree as a person, a nonhuman forest person. Trees are not taken, but requested.  Respectfully, the cutter explains his purpose and the tree is asked permission for the harvest.  Sometimes the answer is no.  It might be a cue in the surroundings--a vireo nest in the branches, or the bark's adamant resistance to the questioning knife--that suggests a tree is not willing, or it might be the ineffable knowing that turns him away.  If consent is granted, a prayer is made and tobacco is left as a reciprocating gift.  The tree is felled with great care so as not to damage it or others in the fall.  Sometimes a cutter will make a bed of spruce boughs to cushion the landing of the tree.  When they finish, John and his son hoist the log to their shoulders and begin the long walk home.

***For more on trees, their amazing capacity to communicate with one another, their ability to feel and so much more than we comprehend read, The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben.