This excerpt from Stephanie Kaza’s book The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees is so attuned to the life and beauty of trees. I am stirred by the way Kaza feels surrounded by trees in the wood in her home. Yet she feels the pain and sadness of the fact that we alter trees’ natural shapes, straightening them into boards that conform to the rectangular shapes we feel are ‘right’ for our buildings. I like this passage very much because the author deeply ‘gets’ trees.–April MooreÂ
I have woken up at the end of a long week of tiredness, I am tootired to go anywhere. Too tired to seek out a tree for comfort. Tootired to walk in the forest on the mountain. Too full of sadness andtenderness that speaks through me as I teach about how we are living
with the environment, how we are dying with the environment. It is a
difficult work to be present with the state of the world. The more I
pay attention to the economic and political forces driving
environmental deterioration, the less certain I am that anything I do
will stop it. My heart aches for the thoughtless deaths of so many
trees. Sometimes I long for a break from the destruction and grief.
Here in my home I find some comfort in the beauty and simplicity of
this house. I am grateful to be surrounded by wood and the memory of
trees. Wood walls and ceilings, a beautiful oak floor, paned glass and
wood windows, kitchen cupboards crafted of wood. From all sides I am
embraced by wood. The presence of trees soothes my eyes and soul. The
natural warm brown color is restful. It is just what it is, nothing
extra. No decorations, no wallpaper, no paint, no layers of anything
masking the wood. The simplicity is refreshing. I appreciate the
unevenness and random variation of the wood.
All these trees - the oaks in the floor, the firs and redwoods in the
walls, the cedar in the yarn chest - are trees of the Pacific forest,
trees of my homeland. But here in the house they are quiet and alone,
no longer dancing in the wind or singing with the birds. It feels a
bit like a tree cemetery - in elegant form, of course. It is hard to
think of the wood as dead. It doesn\’t feel like I live in a house of
death. The grain of the wood is too alive. Its memory is too vivid,
etched from the experience of lifetimes. I feel the histories of
individual trees; they resonate in each beam and board.
One thing is wrong though - the straightness. All of the wood has
been cut into straight forms. Trees, however, are not entirely
straight, especially the hardwoods. It is convenient to live in this
straightness. It makes walking and organizing things easier. It works
well with gravity and the desire of the inner ear for balance. But I
miss the graceful curves of the living tree. I miss the tangle of
branches, the intimate spaces between the twigs and the fingers of
each limb. Planed surfaces in a house have all the intimacy ironed out
of them. They have been flattened, standardized, regulated, cut to
conform to the human design. In the process the trees\’ own naturally
beautiful shapes have been altered beyond recognition.
So this is the pain of it: in leaving its life-form behind, the wood
has become an object for human use. Object - where is the heart in
that? An object is something to carry around, to count, to purchase,
to collect. It is something separate. The process of objectification
begins with the first cut toward straightness. After the tress are
felled the conspiracy of object continues in the timber sales report,
lumberyard accounts, and architectural plans. The carpenters perhaps
cradled the wood in their hands as they built this house, but did they
remember the once-living trees? I wonder who among the many people who
deal with wood as product have walked in the forest of these trees and
listened to their voices. When the memory of tree has vanished and the
connection is broken, the wood becomes corpse, or not even corpse, but
something that appears to have never been alive.
                  