youareatree

[youareatree]

Some People think there is no water here

Some People think that this place is dry

Because there is no river for them to drink

But each morning, a river flows uphill

A river of moisture

A river of fog

Enough to get by

If you’re from around here

And you know how to drink from the air

[youareatree]

"'Oh, all big things are reposeful,' said Gilda, 'look at the beech trees.'

'I am a very wiry Scotch fir,' said Fanny with relish. 'I stand against the skyline and cry out for gales. When they come I ecstacize. Gilda, you are a larch tree planted in a windy place. You look down and think you long for a valley, but every inch of you undulates. In a calm you'd go quite limp...'"

- Elizabeth Bowen, Sunday Evening (Collected Stories, Vintage, p.92).

[youareatree]

Joyce conjoins sociopolitical history and natural history in a fantastical tree wedding ceremony. Humans and trees entwine and merge to celebrate the marriage of Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley and Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters. The wedding guests are human-tree hybrids. (The confetti—“hazlenuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs, and quicken shoots”—inspires the punctuation of my tree alphabets.) This human-tree entwinement offers the possibility for a symbiotic relationship with the land.1 We are both ourselves and the trees.

- Holten, K. (2020) Deciphering Words in the Woods: A New Irish Tree Alphabet, Emergence Magazine.

[youareatree]

More Readings:

Theory:

Mythic Transformations: Tree Symbolism in the Norse Plantation

The Tree of Virtues and the Tree of Vices in Beinecke MS 416

The Colour Green in Medieval Icelandic Literature: Natural, Supernatural, Symbolic?

Practices:

The Aromas of Trees: Five Practices, by David G. Haskell.

Encountering Trees: An Emergence Magazine Practice.

Woods Work, by William Bryant Logan.

[youareatree]

This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans.

- Ghosh, A. (2022) The Nutmeg's Curse.

[youareatree]

And the essential step toward silencing nonhuman voices was imagining that only humans were capable of telling stories ... what is at stake is not so much storytelling itself but, rather, who can make meaning, and that we’ve put the ability to make meaning purely within the human realm.

- Vaughan Lee, E. (2022) Beings Seen and Unseen: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh, Emergence Magazine.

[youareatree]

"The planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings seen and unseen that inhabit a living Earth."

- Ghosh, A. (2022), The Nutmeg's Curse

[youareatree]

... I was so shaken that I groaned. It is the only time in my life that I have ever said anything out loud.

- K. Le Guin (2009) Direction of the Road.

[youareatree]

Eternity is none of my business. I am an oak, no more, no less. I have my duty, and I do it; I have my pleasures, and enjoy them, though they are fewer, since the birds are fewer, and the wind’s foul. But, long-lived though I may be, impermanence is my right. Mortality is my privilege. And it has been taken from me.

- K. Le Guin, U. (2009), Direction of the Road.

[youareatree]

I am thankful that I am an oak, and that though I may be wind-broken or uprooted, hewn or sawn, at least I cannot, under any circumstances, be squashed.

- K. Le Guin, U. (2009) Direction of the Road.

[youareatree]

Next month, however — September it was, for the swallows had left a few days earlier — another of the machines appeared, a new one, suddenly dragging me and the road and our hill, the orchard, the fields, the farmhouse roof, all jigging and jouncing and racketing along from East to West; I went faster than a gallop, faster than I had ever gone before. I had scarcely time to loom, before I had to shrink right down again.

- K. Le Guin, U. (2009) Direction of the Road

[youareatree]

They did not use to be so demanding. They never hurried us into anything more than a gallop, and that was rare; most of the time it was just a jigjog foot-pace. And when one of them was on his own feet, it was a real pleasure to approach him. There was time to accomplish the entire act with style. There he’d be, working his legs and arms the way they do, usually looking at the road, but often aside at the fields, or straight at me: and I’d approach him steadily but quite slowly, growing larger all the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and the rate of growth perfectly, so that at the very moment that I’d finished enlarging from a tiny speck to my full size — sixty feet in those days — I was abreast of him and hung above him, loomed, towered, overshadowed him. Yet he would show no fear.

- K. Le Guin, U., (2009) Direction of the Road.