A sort-of book review, thoughts about trees...

...and a bit of poetry

Part 1

I read a lot. Often, if I enjoy one book by an author, I’ll seek out other titles they wrote. Lately, given the way the Big World is going, I’ve been actively looking for books that give me hope. That has led me, among other things, to look for more non-fiction works by Peter Wohlleben, whose book The Hidden Life of Trees I read some time ago.

My library happened to have a copy of one of this other books, The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We Let Them. I took the bait in that subtitle and checked it out.

Wohlleben is a German forester with OPINIONS about trees - opinions based on sound scientific knowledge and years of experience. The book really caught my interest because, in addition to its overriding theme (if we quit messing with nature, much of it will heal itself) it described the way trees work in fascinating detail: how they manage water and nutrition, how they communicate with each other, how (contrary to appearance) a lot of labor is involved in the process of leaves turning color and dropping in the autumn.

I never knew.

I was taught the basic elementary-school version, back in the day: Trees need to conserve moisture over the winter, so they let their leaves die and fall off in the autumn.

But it’s way more complicated than that. I ended up having a number of conversations with the Offspring, who is a college biology major looking to work in ecology/environmental research. We talked about how the trees actually retrieve the chlorophyll from the leaves and store it so they don’t have to make it from scratch the next spring (the yellows and golds in autumn leaves are the real color of the leaves, minus the chlorophyll). How that glorious red color in some autumn leaves is a substance the trees actually manufacture in the autumn, if they judge that they have enough resources to do so. How they have to build a little cellulose seal at the spot where the leaf attaches to the branch, so it can fall off without leaving a place where the tree would lose moisture and be susceptible to attack from insects or disease.

It’s so complex - and so beautiful.

Autumn is my favorite season, always has been. Right now, I’m surrounded by one of the most glorious autumns I’ve seen in years. It’s quite cinematic, as if the local land spirits were actively showing off that they’re good at Doing Autumn. I’m grateful for their enthusiasm.

Part 2

I used to write a lot of poetry. Beginning in adolescence, when so many of us pour our hearts out onto the page in stilted, gushingly emotional language, I wrote poetry.

For me, it was a way to express the inexpressible. The words in a poem, after all, don’t work quite the way they do in prose.

Then, at some point, I stopped. I’m not even sure why. I still wrote chants and rituals, which I suppose are a kind of poetry. But somewhere along the way, the poetry-for-its-own-sake dwindled and stopped.

Recently, I’ve found my way back to it.

Occasionally, my poetry rhymes and has proper meter and all those other things my high school English teachers enthused about. But most of the time, it’s free verse, because that’s how my brain works.

So, with all those tree conversations still on my mind, and with an almost overwhelming display of autumnal beauty surrounding me for days on end, I felt compelled to try once again to express the inexpressible in a bit of verse. I hope you enjoy it.

Autumn
The woods are aflame
With the fire of willing death
Turning inward
Letting go
Learned people say
It takes great effort
For a tree to lose its leaves
To retrieve the green
To close the tiny doors
It must be
An active choice
This seasonal death
The tree remembers
But the leaves forget
When I lose my own leaves
Shed this seasonal body one day
I hope my tree remembers
So when I sprout new leaves
I can remember
How profoundly loved we all are
In this forest of souls

Whatever season you’re experiencing right now, I hope it inspires you to reflect and create.