1/1/12 -
I am going back through my blog, deleting the names of my neighbors who have logged the land here, the forests of home.

With time, and a couple days of break from the constant sound of falling trees, I have realized that this writing is not truly meant to be a vendetta against my neighbors.  It is about a much bigger picture, and my hopes that there is some illumination in these words that brings the disconnect between people and the earth home in a deep and honest way.

It is cause for concern, whether it is the rain forests of Brazil or the forests of Beavercreek, our willingness as a people to level whole breathing entities without regards to the great gorillas, smooth black satin panthers, or the tiniest brown and gold salamanders wriggling through fir needles after a good spring rain.  We are destroying habitat for animals as we are destroying the wild in ourselves.

These places live in us when we take our children hiking, camping, introducing them to the beauty of nature, the wonder of trees.  We smile as they see their first take-your-breath-away waterfall buried deep in a forest, or the stunning leaps of dark red salmon spawning upriver in a right of passage as old and ancient as the trees, all of us, going home to some deep calling.

Native peoples speak of "The Seventh Generation," and how we must consider the children of the future, seven generations from now, as we make decisions affecting the land, the waters, the air and earth we share with so many.  I had looked forward to the day I might take my partner's grandchildren for long walks in the woods when they came to visit, the woods that now lie stripped and naked.  They will never know how beautiful it was here and what has been lost.  It is gone forever.

The planet is in peril, global warming and carbon emissions a fact, proven over and over to all but the most entrenched deniers of science.  If we watch the trees fall silently, are we not accomplices to this great imbalance?  If we do not ache when a forest is cleared, we have lost our most basic connection to the earth, the sea water in our veins that bleeds black oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the barely breathable air that hovers gray and dense as fog over Peking, Mexico City and Los Angeles.

Children sit in front of screens all day and only know of towering redwoods from calendars and post cards, never witnessing the astonishing miracle, their centuries old splendor reaching clear into the sky.  You must walk among them to truly know their magnificence.  You must rise up early in the woods to hear the first sweet birdsong of waking mornings.  You must sit still among them, nearly dry in the rain under a canopy of woven branches to feel and trust the nature of their shelter.

This is what I weep for, this is what I pray for.  May these words land where they are needed, may we all become keepers of the forests, recognizing every tree as holy.  Whether it stands budding between city streets, some small vestige of the great forests, or rises among the tall cedars, fir and pine, each one a gift that brings us back to the earth, the roots of where we come from.

Blessings on the trees, the ones who breathe us still, the ones who now lie in the mill yards.  May we love the tall green friends who live near and in each of us.  In loving them, we become holy ourselves.