As is our routine, I briskly walk my dogs through the forest again this morning. Often this is a mindless form of exercise for me and a time for the dogs to purposefully sniff and dig. Today I was struck by the vacuum left in the forest by a recently fallen 50 foot spruce, now reduced to a stump and scattered sawdust.
Its comparably long life, much longer than you or I but much shorter than expected, unceremoniously deposed. Hastedly de-limbed, chunked and removed, now the only evidence of its life was the vacancy it once filled. It made me smile to think that its violent end-of-life was also an act of defiance in that when it fell this noble tree blocked the road and commanded attention.
The whiteness of the snowy winter and the seasonal suspension of lesser plants once gave this tree a singular stature.
While fir trees are generally successful in this stingy forest, this is where nature abhors a vacuum, where other life forms compete in an over-subscribed space, for sunlight in an unforgiving canopy and for sustenance in a wind-swept and salty soil. While some trees are gnarled and seemingly deformed and others full of stark branches covered in mosses and lichens, the fallen spruce once towered like a citadel amongst its brethren.
As I continued by walk, I caught myself categorizing and labeling the various tree types. Trees can be understood as different or they can be seen as similar. After all, they all live and die under the same conditions and needs and all attempt to eke out an existence in the same patch of land. Much like all other life forms, including each of us.
When I classify and label it aids communication but also reinforces the “nature” of our relationship to our ecosystem.
They are things in our service, even when their service demands genetic modification or extinction. For it is often in subtle ways that we hide behind the great truth of our existence, that all life forms live within a closed ecosystem and all are required to sustain our lives. Such is the path we take when we see differences and not similarities between life forms.
I take a moment to survey a patch of alder, a common tree that utilizes its nitrogen-fixing root noodles to successfully dominant other species. Last spring I transplanted a few spruce saplings that I plucked from their winter dormancy to better understand how these two tenacious plants might find harmony. Today I see the first promising signs of life in the healthy tips of these young trees above the foot-high snow.
For a moment I become lost in my thoughts about the cycle of life but, soon, I am abruptly ‘awakened’ by the sight of one of my dogs lifting his leg on subject of my thoughtfulness, a fledgeling spruce sapling, and realize that today’s walk has ended.
My Transformative Journey 