I went for a walk today and saw a windthrow—well, lots of windthrows actually but one in particular caught my eye. There is something so very beautiful about them; how trees become homes to new lives even after their own have ended. The way nothing really dies in nature—everything is just small parts of the same life, so how can you tell where one ends and the other begins? How one organism contributes to the lives of others, even in death. And the way fungi share one mycelium. Every beginning is an end to something else. So much of the world lives in symbiosis. And when everything breathes as one, the air never stops flowing.
And just knowing
That everything will end
Should not change our plans
When we begin again
–Hozier, All Things End
And also the idea of lying on the forest floor for years, rooting yourself to the ground once again. How wandering deeper into the woods is very much an act of coming home. The feeling of a flower petal beneath your fingers and the knowledge that we are of the same world. The unconditional peace nature. No expections. No demands of productivity. Where just existing is enough.
The sun is bright, my roots run deep, and the breeze is fresh and clear. I think I shall stay here for a good long while.
–Graeme Patrick, Putting Down Roots, The Magnus Protocol
I have thought a lot about that the last two days—trees and roots and windthrows and the act of being uprooted and climate change and capitalism and how we have uprooted our connection to nature and the feeling of moss beneath your hands and breathing in sync with the trees around you and the way the potted plants in my window reaches towards the sunlight and hope and what a better future looks like.
We lay here for years or for hours
Thrown here or found
To freeze or to thaw
So long we become the flowers
Two corpses we were
Two corpses I saw
–Hozier, In A Week