The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest doesn’t know this planet. I have come out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world. – Pablo Neruda, Memoirs

Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.

Where do you start someone’s story when every life has more than one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning, nor is death exactly an end?

Wisdom consists of ten parts: nine parts of silence, one part of words.’

If you weep for all the sorrows in this world, in the end you will have no eyes.’

The ancients believed there was a pole that ran through the universe, joining the underworld to earth and heaven, and at the centre of this pole towered, mighty and magnificent, the great cosmic tree. Its branches held up the sun, the moon, the stars and the constellations, and its roots reached all the way down into the abyss.

There was something childlike in the way grown-ups had a need for stories. They held a naive belief that by telling an inspiring anecdote – the right fable at the right time – they could lift their children’s moods, motivate them to great achievements and simply change reality.