12-20 -

I say to my friend Kate “I used to love blue” until it became the marker of coming devastation and loss.  Two months ago they spray painted blue lines across the bark of trees that will be coming down.  I have wept for them, prayed for them, sung to them, hoping to prepare them, prepare myself, for what lies ahead.

There is no preparing for what is happening now.  They have started above, near my neighbor’s house, clear-cutting one whole section and thinning out all the trees that used to line their driveway.

There is no familiar whine of chainsaws, only the insistent metal sound of steel tracks digging up the red earth of Beavercreek, and the steady, sickening crash of tree after tree falling to the earth.

I am nauseous, I am angry, I am desperate.  I walk into the woods weeping, screaming at them to stop, swearing at my neighbors, my friends, the people I brought out here and encouraged them to buy the adjacent 45 acres, thinking we were like-minded in our love of trees, never imagining this.  Their decision to destroy this forest as we have known it, to change the landscape we have called home for years, is devastating.

It feels like war, the constant falling of trees, soldiers on the battlefield, lost and gone forever from their tall green bodies, only spirits now where once they sheltered raccoons and cougars, and me.

I go once again to the Grandfather, a tree over 200 years old, the guardian of all on this land.  He is my guide as well, where I have gone to pray and ground and listen for over 20 years. 

In the 60‘s Oregon’s famous “Columbus Day Storm” tore the whole top part of the Grandfather away, like the church steeples toppling over in a photo published nationally in the Saturday Evening Post.  He was stripped away to half a tree, open at the top to rain and birds, the remaining branches still photosynthesizing a life, roots still clinging to the earth where the Molalla Indians built their homes, where pioneers passed, and farmers grazed their cows.  Witness to all of us, I have known this tree as the Wise One, and I pray now for the resilience of the forest.

He is a child of the original old growth trees here.  We both dream and remember them as I have found the hollowed out stumps of the ancient ones, 7 - 8 feet across.  I imagine their majesty, and have learned to love the ones here now, so much smaller, starting over again as I did when I moved here at 40.

They have held me through heartbreak.  They have danced with me and offered their smiling selves to my camera, lacy dew-covered spider webs decorating them like Christmas trees in the first frosty days of autumn.

How do I let them go now Grandfather?  How do I find peace in this as my friends are dying?  How do I learn to trust their remaining spirits alone when I have so loved and admired their tall, elegant bodies?  How do I ever trust my neighbors again after the taking of such beauty?

The Grandfather reminds me of my job, my work here.  I am to hold ground as they are coming down, praying for them, honoring them, remembering them always.  I stop crying and ranting at the ones responsible, re-focusing on the trees.

I walk among them for what may be the last time, and finally, blue becomes sacred.  I call out “Blessings on your way” to each blue striped friend, one by one, loving them, stopping to look and memorize the forest as it is.

I think of change and impermanence.  I pray deeply for understanding and acceptance, for courage, for surrender.  It is hard work, this witnessing the dying, hospicing my friends out of this world and staying connected in other realms.  I have loved their steady presence, the sureness of their shelter.  I have great gratitude for their protection of the sweat lodge Cher Bear and I built in the center of the woods, their burning branches heating up the stones that I might pray, cleanse, listen and remember.  They have offered themselves over and over, I walk among them in reverence.