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The smell of her red cedar pencil elates her.
It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak, either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, or universities. Lawyers speak for them.
“He wants to give rights to everything alive. He claims that paying trees for their creative invention would make the whole world richer. If he’s right, then our entire social system . . . everything I’ve ever worked for . . .”
The redwoods do strange things. They hum. They radiate arcs of force. Their burls spill out in enchanted shapes.
memory is always a collaboration in progress.
It occurs to Adam where the word radical came from. Radix. Wrad. Root. The plant’s, the planet’s, brain.
There are consolations that the strongest human love is powerless to give.
A forest deserves protection regardless of its value to humans.
He shares a cookout with the four friends who strike him as a Jungian archetypal family: Maidenhair, the Mother Priest; Watchman, the Father Protector; Mulberry, the Child Craftsman; and Doug-fir, Child Clown. Maidenhair is the glue, casting spells over everyone in camp. Adam marvels at her bulwark optimism, even after the routs she has suffered. She speaks with the authority of one who has already seen the future, from high above.
They listen to a book on tape: myths and legends of the first people of the Northwest. The old man of the ancients, Kemush, springs up from the ashes of the northern lights and makes everything. Coyote and Wishpoosh tear up the landscape in their epic fight. The animals get together to steal fire from Pine Tree. And all the darkness’s spirits shift shapes, as numerous and fluid as leaves.
I wouldn’t need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this—this, the growing rings of light and water and stone—would take up all of me, and be all the words I need.
But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.
The effect jars him, and he’s not sure he likes it. But liking and not liking—the rod and staff of commodity culture—mean little to him. He wants only to fill as many of these walls as possible with something that can’t be walled.
And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.
She has told him about the Judean date palm seed, two thousand years old, found in Herod the Great’s palace on Masada—a date pit from a tree that Jesus himself might have sampled, the kind of tree Muhammad said was made of the same stuff as Adam. It germinated, a few years ago. She tells him about the campion seeds, buried yards under the Siberian permafrost. Growing, after thirty thousand years. He just whistles and shakes his head. But he never asks what he wants to ask, what she knows he should. Who’s going to do the replanting?
It occurs to him that the buried treasure in question might not, in fact, be his any longer. He sold the land and everything rooted in it. Buying and selling land: as absurd as getting arrested for recovering your own art.
No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.
This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.
Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.
How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.
Crataegus, the heart healer.
But there’s a tree for every purpose under heaven. Their chemistry is astonishing. Waxes, fats, sugars. Tannins, sterols, gums, and carotenoids. Resin acids, flavonoids, terpenes. Alkaloids, phenols, corky suberins. They’re learning to make whatever can be made. And most of what they make we haven’t even identified.” She clicks through a menagerie of bark behaving badly. Dragon trees that bleed as red as blood. Jabuticaba, whose billiard-ball fruits grow right out of the trunk. Thousand-year-old baobabs, like tethered weather balloons loaded with thirty thousand gallons of water. Eucalypts the
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Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
THE MAN in the red plaid coat says a few words to the dog in a language so old it sounds like stones tossed in a brook, like needles in a breeze, humming.
The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no
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There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they’ll germinate. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.
That’s the scary thing about men: get a few together with some simple machines, and they’ll move the world.
The shape arrests them. It reads them their rights. You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.
life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.
