"Humans are Tuned for Relationship” - Ode to our Grandmother Fir

There is a Great Being outside my studio window. She looks at me while I look at her, day after day in the decade since we met. She is made of bark and needle, formed as root, trunk, and branches. She houses multitudes I can sense more than see.

She has been here since this hillside was forest, and then a mostly-cleared meadow for farming, and then a place for houses and other tree companions who have grown up big and tall and yet still only dream of her vistas. From her uppermost branches, I believe she can see the coast range, just as she has known every sun rise and every sun set for hundreds of years.

Red needles say the tree is dead. Photo from BLM.

We are told she is dead and must come down. There is evidence of this, as last season her needles changed suddenly from deep green to brown. She dropped hundreds if not thousands of little pine cone babies in desperate attempt, or loving reach, to give of her vital force to subsequent generations. Who am I to have picked them all up, and with some exasperation even while impressed by her late-stage fertility?

We would prefer to let the insects have their way with her. Surely even now they are beginning the task of nudging open her bark. In the forest in which this great one likely began her sapling reach for sunlight, she would by rights have another two or three hundred years of being here and nourishing life. In such a time and place, that would be part of her arc, as much a part of the tapestry as the perch she has provided for countless crows, and at least once in my small experience, a barrel-chested owl.

But now in her red coat she strikes fear into the hearts and minds of us two-legged house-dwellers over whom she towers. While we fully believe she could stand through windstorms another season or two, we dare not vouch for her great limbs. And so, with gratitude, with apology, with love, we must allow (and in fact pay a staggering price) to have those limbs removed, and then her body sectioned. I notice that any cross-cut would make a dining table fit for five; and then I notice that it feels disrespectful to think this way.

Always, always, the translation to human terms and human uses. Natural, I suppose, to measure her body with the size of my own. And yet. And yet. There are so many other ways of knowing a thing. Of knowing and of being, and knowing many ways of being.

As autumn unfolds, I have begun reading The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram. I was drawn to the text upon asking my beloved for the twelve book titles that left the greatest impression on him, and he placed this dog-eared copy in my hands. It opens:

“Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils - all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams - These breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.

…All could speak. …The color of sky, the rush of waves - every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger.

…Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting - with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.”

Yes, I have felt nourished even in my blundering meetings.

Her absence will change the micro-climate of this yard, and in fact, of the whole steep hill. I feel we should have some kind of circle. Honor our puny years compared to hers.This thought soothes something. And so, I commit, and notice somehow it’s meaningful to measure not with body, but rather the time given here as witness and with-ness. However we pass on through and beyond.

‘Breathing with the shape of this being with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle, and suffer and celebrate,’ our place, size, and role within the greater whole.

fire and grace,

Amelia