Our green blood, our lungs, our forests: ourselves. . .

. . . or: humans in the feedback loop.

Sorting through papers to file them (the family motto being something like debeo ordinare), I came across what was intended as an introduction for an article for the Canadian Journal of Herbalism. The article has yet to be completed, life having interjected its complexities as it tends to, nor can I put my hands on two of the books I refer to in order to amplify on a couple of points, but by setting it down in its fledgling form, I hope to revive it and develop it.

There is a passage in Tree: A Life Story (Suzuki & Grady -- one of the books that is eluding me at the moment) that more than anything I've read about trees, brings home to me a sense of kinship with them in an intimate physical sense. Walking in old-growth hardwood forests, or in Toronto's densely treed ravines, or in arboreta, or in a sacred grove I know where a religious hermit once lived near a stream northeast of the city, I have many times felt the life of the particular community of trees in a powerful way that has always left me wordless.

Our human penchant for abstraction leads us often into dealing with the natural world through metaphor, an attempt to connect with a rich and complex world with a well-chosen and memorable word or phrase. For it's not just our opposable thumbs and the way they handle tools that set us apart (we like to think) from other species, it's our peculiar use of language. Thanks to language, we can make distinctions between tree and fern, city and country, mind and body, us and them, right and wrong, nature and civilization, health and illness. We find it much more difficult to see -- and articulate -- layers, overlaps, interconnectedness, synchronicity, symbiosis, as our language-inflected brains sort and sift. If we struggle persistently with words and their limitations, we might end up becoming poets or mystics or philosophers, but still the way that language shapes our consciousness dominates our lives.

What struck me when reading John Redden's "Letter" from the editor's desk in the Canadian Journal of Herbalism XXV (2) with its eloquent description of the import of the fairly recent field of psychoneuroimmunology was his opening of the door beyond the linguistic compartments into which we categorize aspects of our human orgnaism. At least now, Western models of medicine can comfortably conceptualize linkages between organs and "systems" (cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, limbic, digestive, and so on) usually treated as discrete entities. We now feel more in tune with talking about feedback loops between our conveniently labeled systems and their interactions with our psychological and emotional states. Candace Pert's book, Molecules of Emotion, was a groundbreaking account of her work in what became the new field of "PIN". Six years ago, a wizardly cybernetician friend by the name of Stafford Beer recommended that I read her book, and a quick search for "psychoneuroimmunology" on Google at one point recently yielded 28,300 sites. Doubtless these included a lot of duplications and dead-end references, not to mention hosts of book-floggers, but there was still enough verbiage incorporoating the new paradigm floating around to consume the most dedicated air-ware fanatic.

The site that led the list when I searched was for "The PsychoNeuroImmunology
Research Society" at http://www.pnirs.org/is, calling itself "an international organization for researchers in a number of scientific and medical disciplines, including pyschology, neurosciences, immunology, pharmacology, psychiatry, behavioral medicine, infectious diseases, and rheumatology, who are interested in interactions between the nervous system and the immune system, and the relationship between behavior and health." Rather a self-reflexicve feedback loop with more a splintering of categories than an actual breaking down of the tradional -ologies.

John's editorial in CJH took the paradigm even further by suggesting that herbalists have an important part to play by helping people to "weave people, science, nature and life into a tapestry that is evolving and sustaining."

I feel a need to push it further by saying: the tapestry is already there. Our species is -- has always been -- part of what gets called the feedback loop. It is still our human pattern of behaviour to say: WE will weave the tapestry. WE will take care of the forests. In other words: WE still see ourselves as separate, as caretakers, as stewards, as users, as researchers -- whatever the noun might be that we use to designate ourselves as the supreme beings, the experts, the fixers, when what might be needed more urgently is to begin to see how we as creatures fit into what we call the tapestry, how all the parts are already woven together, and then learn how to act or better yet "not act" in ways that do not rupture and ruin the whole.

The passage in the Suzuki/Grady book that struck me with awe, is a description of Donald Culross Peattie's work in the lab (more than a half-century ago now) to understand chlorophyll -- the life-blood of so much of the plant world -- and to synthesize it. What he discovered was that the resulting green substance was not only in feel and appearance the very replica albeit differently coloured of human blood, but that its chemical composition differed from human blood by one crucial element particular to each. This may be old hat to a biochemist, but for a reader with a sense of kinship with non-human life forms, the implications are resounding and far more concrete than metaphor. When I locate my copy of the book, I'll revisit the passage, try to recapture the impact it had on first reading, and just let the image sink in all over again.

"the world is not a mindless factory . . . ."

. . . as I read just now, happenstance, in Stephen Harrod Buhner's most recent book, The Secret Teachings of Plants: the intelligence of the the heart in the direct perception of nature. It's heartening to read Buhner's particular insights into being human creatures in a world that we didn't originally make but are determined to clutter with our artifice. And I note this phrase with its attendant irony as I sit at a sophisticated machine that captures my words electronically as the ambient climate is controlled by another electrical device that churns cooled air throughout the house. Outside my window the tall trees are waving in the afternoon breeze performing their age-old practice of cooling and purifying the air, and I realize that I would be more in tune with what they're doing by taking a pencil and a piece of paper out to the decrepit old picnic table out back and writing outside. I realize it will be cooler under the trees -- by as much as three or four degrees behind the house on this day of 31-degree (Celsius) heat, with humidity making the air feel like 38 degrees.

But then I might have to consider that act as being equally artificial: the manufactured pencil inscribing manufactured paper, from trees (white pine?) cut down -- probably clear cut -- to be ground into pulp to make the paper. I would also be far from the demands of the telephone, where I have promised to stand by in case I need to be consulted about some wording on plaques that are being created for a ceremony in early September, when four old trees are to be designated as Heritage Trees and protected as such. Moreover, I'm using my waiting time in the cool cloister of my indoor environment to sort through small hills of paper on my desk looking for notes scribbled during a telephone call barely more than a week ago in connection with a problem that a nearby community of people is having in their determination to save a community of mature trees from being cut down to create a new parking lot in their neighbourhood. My optimism about their efforts is tempered by having spent a day last week at hearings prompted by another neighbourhood group who have for about the past three years worked to prevent more than a hundred trees being sacrificed for a planned housing development that saw the trees as only an obstacle to construction, and the people in the community also as irritants. During the negotiations over the planned site, the developers went ahead (with the okay of a "community council" headed by an elected municipal representative) and removed virtually all of the trees in question. This hearing was in effect a post mortem and there was a case to be made about the process that had made such an act possible. The lawyer for the developers, in her questioning of an arborist of renown who had donated his time to make a presentation on behalf of the community folk, had actually stated (with an emphatic shrug of her shoulders): "surely the trees that were cut down would have died anyway." She suggested that if people wanted trees, they could always go to a park to see them.

Inside my head, the lines from Joni Mitchell's song: "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? Paved paradise, put up a parking lot." Amen.

Have to say this for humans: stubborn. On both sides -- pro-tree, and anti-tree.

Intermittently I search the internet for stories concerning trees from different cultures because of my sense of the importance of people hearing stories about the planet that have the power to connect us to the world beyond our artifice, person to person, and person to place, using language with its capacity to spark imagination and enchant both listener and teller. Taking stories to heart for transmission by speech to the ears and hearts of others, stories often found in old folklore or legend and taken internally, like nourishment, like medicine for what ails us, for

What we are seeing is not in fact on the page, even though it appears to be there.
-- Henri Bortoft (in Buhner)

"Wood Notes Wild"

Turning over new soil here.

A literary web log that I began (in the persona of a hunter of books) this spring has lain fallow for two months as my ecological self became absorbed by goings-on that could best be described as "green".

The inspiration for setting out this new project was a West Coast duende/friend who wonderfully intertwines her garden knowledge, activism, music, and all her explorations poetical/editorial/gastronomical in one walking creature with a soul of wild in her deceptively civilized skin.

From this starting point and my own desire to link with folk who devote great amounts of energy to improving the planet, even one tree at a time, came the serendipitous sortes libri (pace my latinate duende) in the pages of Kim Taplin's Tongues in Trees: Studies in Literature & Ecology, viz opening by chance to the section on Richard Jefferies, "Gates of Another World", and the opening reference:

"In September 1881 Jefferies jotted 'Wood Notes Wild' in his notebook as a projected title . . . ."

. . . . although the actual piece is not known to have been written. Jefferies is new to me, but instantly appealed because of the snippet appearing in this section from his A King of Acres, on the oak tree (therein lies another tale) and I was drawn to discover more about him and his writing.

There is of course an intersection of greenworld doings and writings about same. Today for example I received an exhibition catalogue from the British Library of its recent exhibit, The Writer in the Garden, making connections between the worlds of writing (and the creative imagination generally) and the doing of spadework either literally in the case of planting or metaphorically in the case of community-based actions to heal the world by keeping it green and healthy.

Here's hoping that the worlds of imagination and earthwork will cross-fertilize and be seeded with ideas and comments from others.