This is about craving stillness at a time when loud men go around insisting you are either chasing or being chased. This is what passes for insight around here, so I prefer silence. The other night I dreamed I was in Joyce Kilmer’s memorial forest in the Smoky Mountains, among the last contiguous old growth in these states. He who had lamented before he died, how he could only offer poems whereas trees were something else. I woke saddened to realize that the day ahead would take me elsewhere, so went on daydreaming about a future walk, in a rainforest up the coast behind the clouds, above the gray sand. I went after it in the nearest book and found the gray bark of redwood standing as the silent columns of a ruined temple; the sword ferns chest high, the air tasting of lemons. Someone is running up ahead. I am trying to hear the hermit thrush. The light here is an underwater light and the surface of this sea above this grove is in the sky and even the birds are quiet at this time. This is a leaning in. Here, years move in a circled dance. There is nowhere else to go.
Inspired by recent readings: Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees, and Monica Gagliano‘s research into Plant Communication.
