To me it’s like entering a war zone. A complete annihilation of life at a heart-stopping speed. Part of me wants to rage. To point fingers. To blame. To say to the collective masses, “This is what you cheered for, as though it is a victory.” I cannot help but be angry. I have only entered the second stage of grief.
Aren’t you glad it’s not your home?
For some this is a victory, but I can’t help thinking about squirrels running down the supporting structures of their homes as they fall like dominoes, wondering if they made it to safety in time. Birds, flying the nest. Chipmunks hiding beneath the ground, unable to hold their ears against the maddening roar of destruction.
How much life was lost?
There were coyotes and deer and this forest. There were countless insects and the life that lives beneath the ground, and only sometimes comes to the surface. Not to mention the hundreds of trees and plants, razed in one day.
The dead trees are piled, too neatly. One thinks of the Holocaust.
Should we be proud of this?
A week ago my children ran and laughed under a canopy of trees.
I want to believe that we can make peace with this land, that we did before it was destroyed, but the truth is, we haven’t. There was no collective ceremony. No giving thanks and asking for forgiveness, only a righteous justification in a belief that it was ours to dispose of as we wished.
“We bought the land for this purpose thirty years ago.”
In 30 years a forest of life grew and flourished. In 3 days it was gone.
Tomorrow has arrived, and the forest I knew has begun to turn into yesterday. I can think of little else.
The trees by the roadside are being felled first
I want to bare witness to each fall of life, and I also want to stay tucked inside my home. This morning, as if by happenstance, I was given the grace of friendship by my side while I walked the path of memory. We heard the saws long before we saw the evidence, and while I listened to their unyielding power, I swallowed back grief and regret.
Life is a series of sacrifices. Life, by nature, cannot be possible without death, yet I struggle to make sense of loss. Especially when ceremony is replaced with a belief in ownership. This distancing of connection. A forgetting that we are of the land, intricately tied together in this beautifully complex, strong, yet fragile, web of life.
How many days, I wonder, will it take for the last of my friends, destined for death, to fall to the ground? In mere seconds, when we reached the edge of the woods, by way of the field, I watched a whole group of them fall nearly at my feet.
The only people stationed to warn were beside the paved road, as though they have already forgotten that feet pass through the forest often. That life is abundant, even with the leaves have yet to bud into bloom. If we had not been aware, we could have fallen with them.
“Questioner: I seem to have suffered a great deal all my life, not physically, but through death and loneliness and the utter futility of my existence. I had a son whom I greatly loved. He died in …
I need a man. Well, actually, I could do with a couple… but let’s not be greedy. What I really need is a knight…with or without the shining armour. I can manage either way. Noble, court…
The winds brought her howling and moaning to the bottom of the stairs where her powerful claws scraped aside the wallboard to rush up the stairs so she could howl and moan at the baby gate. Her first visit occurred somewhere between 12:30 and 1:00am, and it felt like I had just fallen into a nice, comfortable sleep. My husband hustled her back down the stairs, re-secured the “gates,” two or three times. The entire household now wide awake, except the 12 yr. old who had taken some Melatonin and was sleeping soundly like we all should have been.
The hound would not give up though, she was terrified. Who knew what horrors she had lived through in the first three years of her life, roaming the streets of the south. Tornadoes, hurricanes…my mind was going to all corners of possibility as I pulled on my exercise pants, grabbed my pillow and made my way down the stairs.
“Don’t stay with her, she’ll just get used to it,” my husband warned, calling forth words used long ago when our youngest used to be terrified at night. I took his advice, as I once had, trying to assuage her fears, then, after creeping back up the stairs with her scrambling after me twice, I gave in. Just like I had 8 years before.
First we tried to nestle onto the couch, but after lying awake for about 1.5 hrs, I decided to pull it out into the bed hidden beneath its cushions. Still shaking like a terrified child, my companion for the remainder of the night finally settled into the nook of my folded legs and fell into a snoring slumber.
Just as sleep began to descend upon my lids, the guinea pig decided it was meal time. At around 3:00am, I found myself, once again, wide awake, listening to “Kisses” vigorously lapping the metal ball of her water bottle for what felt like an eternity. She stopped, briefly, then began again. Two more times.
I thought of putting her in the basement, with the cat that was now howling, cage and all, or taking away her water source for the remainder of the night. Would that be considered animal cruelty, I wondered? I can certainly make it through a night without drinking.
But, as the wind howled outside, and my canine companion’s breathing body of warmth was nestled happily beside me, my thoughts turned to how lucky I am. I have a home after all, and a bed to sleep in, even if it was, at that moment, a pulled out couch with no sheets and not enough blankets. I have shelter and comfort. I had love, pure, unconditional love, snuggled beside me, and I felt full and content. Some nights, 3 hrs of total sleep is enough. Especially when you’ve got a home filled with love.
I didn’t intend to write a blog post this morning among the list of things I wanted to accomplish, but sometimes what plan to do is not what we were meant to do.
When I walked out of the door this morning, Crow greeted me as she often does these days, from somewhere hidden among the tall trees in my yard. She continued to call each time I brought more boxes to the end of the drive for donation, and I thought of her, later, when I stepped into the woods with my two canine companions. I’m almost certain a third was with me, in spirit. Tomorrow will mark the year of her passing, but I did not weep for this loss.
In truth, I had not been thinking about Daisy, but about the life that lives in the woods down the road from my house, where I have long enjoyed walking with my dogs and family. Once, my daughter and I saw a pack of coyotes running through the trees. Today, I noted the tracks of deer and wild rabbit marking paths home through the fresh snow.
The morning was quiet, aside from the incessant hum of traffic that always filters through the trees, and the soft tread of my feet, accompanied by the dogs runny ahead of me. Rosy and Zelda were filled with joy, as they always are when they step inside these woods.
About a month ago I had a dream. I was sitting on the hillside below the forest, where children sled in winter, and families gather in the summer to listen to music. I was looking at the vast sky above where dragonflies dance, when the message came through, “Don’t let them bulldoze this sacred ground.”
Now, weeks later, long ropes of tape mark off the boundaries around several acres of trees. Wooden stakes in the ground label potential gravel dumps and irrigation ditches. There is even one that says “pond” where there is no water. I almost laughed at the irony, but instead I cried. Standing among the sentient beings of the forest who speak in a language most have forgotten, I wept for this sacred ground that so many call home. When did we forget? I wondered. We are of the Earth.
Perhaps we need to forget in order to remember. I know that each time I have forget my sacred connection to my Truth, and the much wider Truth of Life, my body/mind/spirit becomes out of alignment until I have no choice but to remember.
We are of the Earth, but we do not own the Earth. She, in fact, owns our bodies, where are made from her nutrients. Long before we walked her surface, she was here, flourishing with life. She will be here long after we leave, broken perhaps, but she will heal. We depend upon her, she does not depend upon us.
At some point, the collective consciousness of humanity chose to forget. There are times when I think it is almost a burden to feel everything, but this is one of those mornings when I am so very grateful that I have chosen to reside in a vessel that remembers how to feel this sacred connection to all life. I believe we all have this ability to feel, this innate knowing, but many of us have chose to forget.
We value our homes. We love the beauty we create, and the money we make is invested into making our homes as beautiful as we can, yet what about this larger home we all share, that we all depend upon? When did we forget that we walk upon sacred ground? When did we forget to that the air we breathe comes from the lungs of Earth we call trees?
Clean air and water have become a universal gift of a long forgotten past, because of us. I walk the woods to remember Home. I walk the woods to feel whole again. When there is a rip in the web, we are all affected.
It has sadly become an abnormality. An uncool condition. A label of scorn…to remember connection. To remember Home. To remember that all life is sacred, and that the “I” cannot exist without the “We.”
The Light Behind the Story 