The forest

My daughter finds The Lorax genuinely terrifying; as, I think, she is supposed to do. All the more so since we’re well and truly in the future it was about. We know now what the ‘unless’ looks like. She hasn’t known a time before it. In the world she was born to, the rivers already run with waste. The sky thickens. The forests are going.

In the story, the trees, the animals, fish, and birds all depend on one another in the kind of simple circle a child can grasp. In the real forest, the web of life is vastly more complex — more animate, intimate, intricate, and abundant than we imagined. There is no emptiness or waste place; no exhaust. There is nothing outside it. We ourselves, contrary to centuries of exceptionalism, are not outside it. We are closer to it — ecologically and genetically — than we care to think about. The world is full of life on every scale, and old verities about sentience itself are being jostled and stretched.

Some fairly stunning research about forests has lately given rise to a florescence of books about trees. Suzanne Simard writes in Finding the Mother Tree about her discovery of the throbbing webs that lie beneath the forest floor and link the trees in complicated ways. Through mycorrhizae — fungal systems that thrive among tree roots — trees share nutrients and knowledge and even nurture. ‘Mother trees’ care for their offspring through whole lifetimes, as well as for the forest as a whole, to say nothing of what the forest itself does as our planet’s liver and lungs. In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben explains that trees will go on nurturing a stump for centuries after the tree has been felled. We used to assume trees were in competition with each other for land and light. By and large, they’re not.

Larkin saw threshing tree crowns as ‘unresting castles.’ Mary Oliver wrote of

that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water.

The unobservable mysteries are now known to be much more complex and collaborative. The forest, and what lives beneath its floor, holds something we might as well call intelligence. The subterranean castle is in fact more like a city or even a civilisation. Wohlleben says ‘there are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet.’ All of it nourishing. All of it cooperative. All of it vital.

In the same moment that we’re learning all this, we’re learning how much of it is threatened with irretrievable loss. Ancient trees are felled and land is cleared at a fearsome rate. We break and burn the forests like we really think there’s no tomorrow. Like so much else to do with climate change, we’re in a race between knowing and doing. I hope the more we know the more we’ll save. The more we understand what we stand to lose unless we change, the more we’ll change. My daughter gives me hope. She talks about how different things will be when she’s grown up. She talks as if we’ve already decided to live deliberately. To recover the forests and clear the air and restitch the web. She was born into this world, but she already lives in a better one.

The tree

There’s a tree in our backyard so huge I might as well say that we live under it. Its trunk is massive, but the crown is truly vast — at least the size of our house and probably bigger. We can pick it out from well beyond our property. It towers over the houses and the other trees in our street. It’s home to many creatures, in particular a family of possums, but also magpies, mudlarks, wattlebirds, cockatoos, galahs, lorikeets. When it flowers, the hum of bees is like a distant train. When the wind blows through it, it rains tiny pods on our roof and the sound is like a storm. I think of Larkin’s line:

Still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness…

The neighbours want it gone. It rains pods in their yards too, and threatens their fences. We looked at getting it removed. It is a liability, and we like to live at peace, as far as it depends on us, with the neighbours. But in this instance, it didn’t depend on us. Permission denied. It’s a ‘significant’ tree. More significantly, an arborist told us our tree — a sturdy, slow-growing yellowbox gum — is at least a hundred years old. ‘You’ve got to respect a tree like this,’ he said. His words stayed with me. They changed the way I saw the tree. Who was I — latecomer, flourishing and fading like grass — to wish it away? I began to respect it. To think about what has happened in its century of life. To look down at the mosaic of shadows by which our garden is transfigured. To look up in wonder at the spreading corona, the unresting castle, limbs outstretched to any passenger of the upper air. It is a significant tree. It’s absurd to call it ours, or even to say it’s in our garden. Our house was built, the garden laid out, when it was already 50 years old. It was already there when the roads and plots of our suburb were drawn up. Unless the laws change or it comes down in a storm (which the arborist thought unlikely) it will be there in another hundred years. We live, for a time, in its shadow. And then we’ll go.

A second life

This place has been silent lately, untouched for more than three years. I liked knowing it was here. I hoped somebody might still look in from time to time. But my hands and days were full. I had neither inspiration nor leisure to sit down to it; barely time to reflect on how little time I had for reflection. Michael Longley says that poets have a second life. ‘No experience is complete until I’ve written about it… It’s a way of having more than one life.’ When I heard this, it resonated because this second life — this layer of reflection and recording and refining and creating — is exactly what has been wanting. Time to look back over one’s experience, even from a distance of hours; to muse on meanings; to find connections between the everyday and the immortal, and to make something out of them — all this is what I have been lacking these last three years and more. Another poet, Philip Metres, gave me a different image. His poem ‘One Tree’ treats a standoff between neighbours over a tree in one yard so large it shades the other.

“Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade? Always the same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love. Like the baby brought to Solomon, someone must give.”

I borrow this image to think about the shadow family casts over creativity. I love my tree. It’s beautiful and bountiful and alive with lovely creatures. But it shades the little plots where I might cultivate creativity. It takes up all the room and nourishment — blights my tomatoes. Plenty of love. Not enough land or light. But it’s a tree, not a monument. It moves and changes. The light changes. As this year begins, something is beginning to give. My tree is tall enough to let some light in. A friend who writes and has small children told me, if you have a child under five, you’re in survival mode. If this is true (it feels true), this year will be our last in that mode. Light dapples the grass. The sky expands. We look up. I come back to my tomatoes, my little plot. I give it, and begin to live, a second life.

Green leaves and blossoms

Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet and Thrush say, ‘I love and I love!’
In the winter they’re silent — the wind is so strong;
What it says, I don’t know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving — all come back together.
But the lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings: and for ever sings he —
‘I love my Love, and my Love loves me!’

I came across this bit of Coleridge in the Children’s Book of Verse I was reading to Olivia this morning. It’s the same book I had as a child, with illustrations by Eric Kincaid. I remember the pictures of Tennyson’s mermaid and merman, dreamy in undersea green and purple, and Jack Frost and Winter the Huntsman, spangled and delicate in silver and snow white. But it was this bit of spring carolling that caught my eye today. I’ve been watching the buds and blossoms, the beginnings of leaflife on all our neighbouring trees. Some of the cherries, peaches and other blossomers are finished already. The Japanese maple and the Chinese pistachio finally have their first tiny fronds. I’m not quite as attentive to birdsong, though I hear our local birds — magpies, mynahs, crows  — begin when I’m awake as the sun rises, putting the baby back to bed, hoping for another hour or so of sleep. For my own sake as much as Olivia’s, I call our attention — hers glancing, peripatetic; mine fragmented, addled by media — to these birds and buds, gracing our garden with their slow unfolding. Helping her notice this waking world and its green resurrection, bringing it to the blooming, singsong regions of her imagination, is one of the deeper joys of this season, this springtime of her life and mine.

Midstream

Another winter afternoon. It's many months since I wrote anything here, or wanted to, or had the time. As I wrote in the wake of my first baby, babies seem inimical to writing. Now we are four, I think how leisurely life was then, how much less we had to do with one than with two. Again, it's wonderful, but I wonder at how anyone copes, especially the ones on their own, and the ones who might as well be. I wonder at how normal frantic is, and how frantic normal is. I have this recurring thought that this is the middle, the midstream. We are in the midst of life: in the thick of work and the lark, the plunge of parenting. Enrollments and appointments and payments. The relay run of playgroup and play dates and library books. The buckling of belts, the folding and unfolding of prams. The duck into the chemist, the dash into the grocery store, kids in tow. Wipes for everything; a veritable infinity of washing. Nappies in handbags and on bedside tables - places that used to hold books. And all this before we even begin down the still more crowded route marked 'School.' I try to remember all those sayings about short days, long years, passing seasons; try to relish the moments with a delicious baby and a delightful four-year-old, at the same time trying to remain clean and sane, on a modicum of sleep. My daydreams are about hot showers (with the door closed) in minimalist hotel rooms with thick, crisp sheets and stacked towels, little islands of silence and cleanliness. One day, maybe. But not for years yet. Not till we make landfall on the other side of infancy. I think about the Frost poem from our wedding -

 And you were given this swiftness, not for haste

Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,

But in the rush of everything to waste,

That you may have the power of standing still...

That power — if we ever had it — seems remote in the rush of everything.  But in the middle of all this locomotion, this cataract called 'normal,' there are days, hours, when all is calm, all is bright. Sometimes they last long enough for me to write about them.