. . . 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)
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