Summer 2022
I live in a forest canopy. Oak, Bay Laurel, Fir, Poplar, Maple, Redwood are my neighbors. I look up to them. I am learning to listen to them, and all their society; Deer Mushrooms, Cramp Balls, Hairy Bracket, Alligator Lizard, Salamander, Garden Snake, Wood Spider, worm, beetle, burrowing bee crawling among Woodland Strawberry, Miner’s Lettuce, Western Lady Fern, Poison Oak, Trillium, Solomon’s Plume, Broad-leaf Forget-Me-Not. Some, like me, are travelers, colonizers. Some have family which stretch back right here all the way until Earth made them. Where I live now is near a street called Zayante. Sayanta is also the name of a Tamien village where dialects of Tamien and Awaswas were spoken for millennia before the Spanish, before the missions, the Mexican ranchos, the Anglo industrialists and railroad barons came here to scrape lumber and futures off the face of these sandstone ridges. I live on Tamien land. The people who belong to this land where I sit and work are still here having survived centuries of genocide and enslavement and persecution. They are still here, but the rent is too damn high and so many live 50, 100 miles inland from the coast. But my ancestors were those same industrialists and colonizers. Their wickedness and greed have placed me in a class of people who can live in this luxury: green earth, spring creek, hummingbird’s nest. I live on someone else’s homeland. I couldn’t point to my own on a map. After centuries of running, hiding, domination and theft, my people don’t tell the story of where we come from anymore, if we ever did. I don’t know if my grandfather spoke Scots, or understood Gaelic. I don’t know if my great-great-grandmother carried moors and dales in her bones which rhymed with the Mni Sota lakes she settled beside. I know that I was taught not to carry their stories with me; I was taught to forget them. So my re-learning curve is as steep as this mountain drop to the creek below. I have no one to learn from but the trees.
Right now, from the trees, I’m learning about time. In Spring I watch the rosy mist of new Maple buds churn to lime-lemon froth. Next, they turn vivid kelly green, wide and splashed with sun. The season of leaves is round and regular, changing and returning. I also see Oak and Bay shoots sprout overnight from stumps long severed. I’ve been taught that the present is all we have. But the shape of the Oak Stump-Sprout contains past and future, with the contours of the present cut out.
Sometimes I think everything has always been just like this and it never changes. Sometimes I feel a great newness unfolding, enfolding around me. Or maybe all the time I know both things. I can’t say it well enough. But the trees know what I mean.
