the storied smoke
The smoke is stifling, depressing, and unhealthy for us humans. We can only take so much grief at once. i think it’s time for a reframe. let’s turn our amazing capacity for noticing, to the trees.
trees have an amazing capacity for communicating. It’s the way they make sense of the world, the way they travel and know things without the joy of individual legs. Scientists have realized that trees speak through their roots, sharing stories of where to find water, how to navigate a new cliff, how deep to reach for nutrients. But what if science also discovered that smoke - tiny bits of burned trees - wasn’t just “smoke” to them? what if this thick layer of haze we, along the western side of the continent are living inside, was actually a potent story for the trees to inhale through limb and leaf? Maybe it’s that the ones burned truly have transformed themselves into tiny particles of wisdom for the ones still standing. Maybe fire for trees is what books are for us.
And in those stories, what grand memories the trees have to recall! …An old black oak remembering the migratory path of the calliope hummingbird or peregrine falcon, an alder recalling where the stream bed deepened over decades of watching, or an ancient redwood, remembering for us all what the world looked like before colonialism and capitalism took hold - what it felt like to live before the human population replaced the bear and bobcat.
For the trees still standing in the diffuse layers of storied smoke, every second of every day and night…perhaps they in turn whisper to the hummingbird which direction to fly. Or the salmon, which fork in the watery path runs deep enough to spawn in. Maybe the willow has received the story from the redwood of how to see us humans from a different vantage point. One that reminds us of our intrinsic place in this great woven basket we call Earth. Maybe, by laying my spine against the willow, i could re-envision human life that is not measured by it’s productivity or power, but instead by it’s generosity and capacity for joy.