The Day After the Storm

{The Landscape Changed}

The day after the storm, the landscape changed.

With her roots now exposed, torn from the ground by the force of the wind, the great tree fell—the same tree that invited me to live here, to which I dedicated an entire book, which taught me and dreamed with me. Her fall tore a deep wound of pain. She had no one to intertwine her roots with to hold on to. Torn out by the wind.

Out of pain and longing, my daughters and I gathered seeds from its fallen body, in a howl between a death wail and a sigh of life. Hands full of seeds, fertile and silent promises.

I wanted to write her an obituary, but I sensed that the death of trees is slow, like a decomposing udder. The death of a tree is a slow alchemy between active life and the decay of gradual rot. It pours gently into the soil, nourishing life, becoming food and home in many ways. Here, death is a fractal, and tree bodies cross this threshold in a very different way than the modern mind expects. Slowly, tuning in to another way of being, gradually crossing the threshold, the veil that deceives us of the division between death and life.

Body-ground. Spilled. Severed but entangled.