Pardon me

Still Another Day #VI

Pardon me, if when I want
to tell the story of my life
it’s the land I talk about.
This is the land.
It grows in your blood
and you grow.
If it dies in your blood
you die out.

Pablo Neruda

A bit worn at the edges and nearly camouflaged, the simple message is still there after two years. Tree took that human written word—once sharply white, crisp, handmade, newly formed—and transformed it into itself: into bark; into bleeding stains of growth and aged lichen-grey peels.

Four letters attached to tree make redundant what tree already knew. Still knows. It was always there, this love within the tree. Only us humans needed to have it spelt out. When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?

Yesterday…..an email from a friend who had just returned from Scotland:

meanwhile jet lag is keeping me awake – as are the log trucks now every fifteen minutes or so down the southern outlet – on this still night they are like a great roaring decelerating down the hill into town then rumbling down Macquarie Street – what a madness it all is – out there in Europe green is huge – what idiots run our govt down here.

Yesterday…..the editorial in the newspaper asked the question: “Should more Tasmanian forests be protected from logging?”  I replied:

The real tragedy is that the question is even asked. To continue putting to the axe aged forests thousands of years old, creates a wound in Tasmania’s psyche as great as the stain of its brutal convict days.

We keep denying the life sustaining power of nature; of its immense capacity to love us back into wholeness. Pardon me, but when the last of the ancient trees are cut down, what then?