Wood is more “elemental” before it has been made into something – or unmade into something, as when it slowly decays to join the earth.
In the destructive cosmological cycle, wood consumes earth. Thinking about a fallen tree, wood also becomes earth. The bark flakes off, the fibers slowly break down and eventually the tree dissolves into the surrounding soil. During the process, little sprouts emerge and insects take refuge, nourishment or both. If the tree falls across a trail, hikers choose whether to duck under or clamber over.
Walking in the woods is deeply joyful. The life of each tree is present and still. In a green forest, wood is more alive than any of the other five, even water—which is a welcome companion on any walk in the woods.
I’m standing on the edge of Long Pond, which is surrounded by woods. I see a fallen tree about 50 feet away. It’s a good-sized pine tree, and the ends of its bare, dead branches spread out in a lacy pattern on the surface of Long Pond. I took a photo here in 2016, and this tree fell sometime since my last visit and now, September 2021. Standing or fallen, it looks right…in contrast to some pine forests nearer my home in Colorado. There’s a difference between a fallen tree that’s at the end of its natural life, and a fallen or standing dead tree that couldn’t withstand the climactic or pestilential challenges it faced. This comes out very strongly in photographs. The diseased trees stand out like sore thumbs. But this fallen tree on Cape Cod, though conspicuous, probably came down in the winter winds that rake the little narrow places on the outer cape. It’s graceful and soft. Probably some frogs, birds and muskrats are happy to have the places of refuge among the branches that graze the surface of the lake. Although it’s down, in some ways it is still deeply alive and serving its surroundings.
How can we be of service to the deep forests—those that thrive and those that struggle? Maybe we could reflect on wood as a part of the cosmological cycle, and every once in a while, just get out of the way. Turn off the need to extract and exploit. Understand that a living (and decaying) forest responding to its natural cycle (including fire), is as powerfully alive as the creatures abiding there.
The sense of living is so hard to describe but so easy to perceive when in the midst of the trees. As I write these words, images play out in my head like a slide show. Rain forests on the Olympic Peninsula. Aspen groves and bristlecone families in the Rockies. The Delaware Wild Forest in the Catskills. Stern Grove in San Francisco. All are beautifully, deeply alive, and all will perish—to make way for new growth or succumb to the destructive force of our species. Which will it be?
