2/9 -

More writing and photos from a week ago.

This blue striped sentry stands watch over the clear cut.  This was one of the trees saved from the devastation.

                                 



                                          This one didn't survive the cutting.

                              I find bits of blue bark scattered among the branches, reminders of who was here and
                              where they have gone.

               This is the cover of a card sent by a young friend of the family who knew nothing of the logging.  She has known my love of trees for years, maybe this is the intuitive way we can all relate when we care deeply about the land, about each other.  The card was perfect.


More writing from last week:
"Timber Management" it says on the sign that marks the start of the massacre.  It begins with calling living trees "timber," as if their only purpose here was to serve as income crops.  It ends with bare hillsides waiting for winter landslides, brown and gold salamanders smashed into the muddy tracks of men and machines who do not care who is killed, who lies buried under the wreckage left behind.

One day three small little birds chirped sporadically as they foraged into the blanket of branches now covering the ground.  They used to sing from trees, flying from branch to branch.  What has happened to their world?

Farther down the road, around the corner, an orange diamond sign warns of trucks entering the road - trucks, dozens and dozens of trucks and trees have been leaving for weeks.  It is a warning beyond the roadway, a call for something deeper, a call to serve others who live on this land.  The four-leggeds, the winged-ones, the ones who crawl above and below the ground.  What if we cared for the land with their welfare foremost in our thoughts.  What has happened to us, the guardians, that we value the money a forest can bring over the way we feel when we walk among their magnificence, sunlight shining through in God-rays?

Trampled ferns were the green of summer mornings, mossy branches inviting tender touch, softened lace pressed into skin, speaking of dew and rain and the nature of hiding spiders.

A whole ecosystem lies in the shambles of "Timber Management."  We lie in pieces too, those who decide a forest is expendable and the ones who wield the chainsaws, the ones who come to sudden, violent ends, the ones who grieve and mourn the loss.

2/9 -

I spend hours down in the clear cut, sitting at the base of a storm-topped tree, in the midst of the ruins of a forest.  "Come back to the trees" the Mother says, as I struggle to love them more than I hold anger at the losses, at the people who have done this.  Healing will come from love, and I still treasure this land, fiercely.












What to do with the horror of what has happened here.  Grief is palpable as mangled limbs and bark are left lying in the mud, half-burried in the giant tracks of machines and human indifference.

I walk down into the bare valley and come up to two huge old growth stumps, remembered well from walks down in the woods years ago, in search of the creek at the bottom of the valley, finding much more.  I used to lay on their wide table-top trunks, 7 - 8' across, such presence still.  Today their red insides crumble in my hands, their age exposed, a century of seasons going back into a patient earth who waits for life and time, seedlings sure to come with the grace of birds and scattered seeds.

I find a tiny hemlock halfway up the hillside. 3' tall and miraculously intact.  I pray that this little one becomes part of a forest here again.

And later, back home at the great Grandfather tree, I pray again for healing here, for peace in my own sad heart...then in the middle of a prayer, in the middle of a day and the woods I vow to protect, an owl flies across in front of Him, silent, sure.  Death medicine in Native American beliefs, I think she has come as a reminder that there is still life here - all of us flying, singing, crawling, running across the land that has endured for centuries.

I am relieved to see her.  In the death of the trees, I am learning how to hold love above all else, I am learning to trust the resilience of the Mother.  I smile and remember the army of us, the "Keepers of the Trees" in Ann Linnea's book, the friends I know who work to save our forests.  I pray that we some day outnumber the loggers, that we convince them trees are more valuable standing, providing beauty and refuge for all, that there is a balance between we humans in our wooden homes, and the great old soul trees left for our grandchildren.

I will welcome the days when the new seedlings are planted, by the workers, by the grace of birds and the miracle of seeds, all of them the future, each of them exquisite.

2/01 (cont.) -

I can see across the valley now, to the trees that were re-planted 10 years ago after another clear cut.  It is a mono-culture that will be clear cut again in another 30 years, as if trees were rows of corn to be harvested, as if they held no other meaning for us than their monetary value.

The machines have left huge footprints....

...digging deep into dark brown loamy earth, made rich by layers of trees.

Having technical difficulties, will try again later to finish this day of observations.

2/01/12 -

A reflection, what is lost, what still remains.

It was quiet yesterday, for the first time in many long weeks.  No machines, no familiar cutting, limbing, stacking sounds, no log trucks pulling away with the trees of this forest, only the silence of a clear cut.

The last time I walked down here the trees were down, waiting to be hauled uphill and off to the lumber mill in Molalla.  The standing maples left beside their fallen family sing to them, as I do, arms raised in prayer, thanking them for their many years of beauty here on the land.

A couple days of snow silenced the machines for the moment, but no white blanket covers up what has happened here.

                                                               

The hillside down below lies littered with the lives of hundreds of maples, scattered tall fir sentries hide in their midst.  I watched them fall from this very place, and I sing once again in their passing, gratitude in every note, every word, every sound a prayer for the spirits who remain.

I came down the trail yesterday, feeling the deep green shelter of the trees on "my" land, preparing to see what is left where the trees of my neighbors have stood, the hollow, empty space of a vanished forest.

How does anyone call this "thinning?"

This is no trail for roaming coyotes and deer.  No cougars walk through open land like this.  The natural habitat for animals, for all of us here, will never be the same again.












                                                             

1/21 –

Sweet memory of trees.

I raised my hand in prayer as I drove home by the clear cut tonight, light shining through the trees, the sillouettes of straggling survivors along the road, and the eery light of clear cut land where a forest used to be.

I thought of my neighbors, the people I have been trying to find compassion for, the ones I trusted to steward the beautiful land of our homes, the people who destroyed it.

The words “They have lost their way” came to me in a song, my heart softened, and I can say that for the first time in this month-long siege, I began to feel an empathy, a sense of what must lie heavy on their hearts and minds, the sheer weight they carry from the havoc they have wrought here.

I stood out on the deck, facing the clear cut and the decimated path I used to walk and sing my way down, unrecognizable now, a war zone.  I prayed once again for the spirits of the trees and animals taken, and, setting my anger and deep, deep sadness aside, I prayed for my neighbors, freely, at long last.  I sensed their sorrow on some level, and offered prayers for the ones who must live with this decision, the wanton destruction of habitat and home.

I came inside and began to listen to my voice mail messages.  The first voice was my neighbor’s, full of shock and remorse.  We have not spoken since it began.  “I feel like I have harmed something very sacred, that I defiled it,” he said, and he has.  He apologized for how “horrifying” it looks, hoping for re-growth in the spring, deep regret filling every word, every pause, as he struggled to convey his recognition of the devastation he has caused.

I will meet him there tomorrow, where the trees once stood.  I will tell him the truth of my experience since the logging began, how truly agonizing and heart wrenching this horror has been.

And I will listen for a greater God, a guide, to bring two deeply saddened spirits into some accord, some understanding of this nightmare and all its implications, some way to find a resting place at the ending of the storm.

I have made horrible choices in my life before and hurt the ones I loved.  None of us are immune in this human state.  How interesting it is that he called tonight, the night I began to find forgiveness, the night he came asking for it.

1/16 -

Everywhere I go these days, the trees are never far from my heart.  This is a poem I wrote last night after seeing two painted owls up on the walls as we were eating lunch in town at a restaurant.  I know I won't see the owls again, here in the woods where we have all nested.

Lost

  

Two painted white owls spread snowy wings 

in the center of black plates hanging at the restaurant –

and I remember the great brown soul

who sat, still, high up in the branches

and watched me pass, staying as I stopped

to see him fully, fully seen.  They will come

no more, for there are no trees, all of us

blinded in the broad bright expanse

where earthen pilgrims stood, silent-winged.

1/14 -

Here, in the midst of mud and machines, lies a forest.

I went into Molalla yesterday for a William Stafford reading.  He is perhaps Oregon's most famous poet laureate, writing much about nature, and beautiful daily ways to see the world.  I loved his poems.  My friend Kate read one of his and a terrific poem of her own, and Paulann Peterson, Oregon's current poet laureate, spoke eloquently about Stafford while sharing his work and her poetry as well.  Local folks read their own works, bringing up their notebooks of sacred poems to the podium, each person clearly moved by words and wanting so to say it, to share it.  They also brought personal artwork and related it to Stafford poems.  It was quite a gathering.

Here is a poem I wrote after two people spoke and shared their art about logging in the Molalla area, how they see it as what has built this entire community.  I see it as something different.

A William Stafford Reading – Nan Collie

 She has painted a solitary ice skater, under a lemon moon, on a saw.

She tells us all about the feel of ice droplets freezing in mid air,

landing on the hardened pond, turning skaters into gliding light-winged fairies.

Then she tells us of the saw, the history of this region,

proud of logging heritage, the foundation of community,

speaking in such reverence.  She has painted on a saw.

Another man has printed Stafford poems on his photos,

beautiful shots of the Grand Canyon, and a baby blue jay

he has nursed, fallen from its nest, now ready to fly. 

Clearly touched by nature, his last piece is an old logging photo,

men posed and proud, perched on piles of logs, a legacy, all that is left

of old growth forests.  He has printed Stafford on the logging of a hillside.

They speak of generational footsteps here on the land.  I recognize

that I am foreign, moving here two decades ago to be among the trees.

I have no wish to take their lives and level landscapes.  

How does pure blue sky live on the blade of a “hard working” saw?

How does a sepia snapshot of destruction sit in the same conversation

next to the golden mile-high walls of a carving Colorado river?

I am baffled, I ache.  I see the same scene here at home, the trees all taken,

leaving only spirits, the trampled remains of squirrels and birds and ferns.

Nothing proud here in my eyes, no skating on the saws that have taken down my friends.