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The earth has music for those who listen

Have you ever said hello to a plant? Not one of those little prisoners in solitary  confinement in a pot, nor even one of the hedgerow soldiers standing at attention in a just-trimmed line, forbidden to wave or thrust a single leaf out of place in greeting lest it risk amputation. No, I mean a free-living plant which, apart from its wide-ranging roots, and a web of underground fungal connections, does not live in debt-servitude to its capricious human benefactors; a plant that welcomes your attention, but has no need to seek it; a wild plant, obedient, no doubt, to different rules -subject to an entirely separate Magisterium.

I suppose we all have our own criteria for friendship: attributes that attract us, like feeling seen, or maybe nonjudgementally accepted. Human friends are what we usually think of in this regard I suppose, but dogs, and maybe cats, also come to mind for me, even if I can only sense their smiles, or trust their body language; it’s why we keep pets. Unlike us, they don’t require a verbal language for communication; it is often only through visual clues, we can understand their meaning: their need to connect.

Sometimes, though, there are things that can summon our attention. Perhaps, ‘summon’ is too strong a word; ‘attract’ may be more accurate –‘summoning’ suggests purposeful agency, something desirous of an action. But is that too complex for a plant… too anthropocentric? We wrote the rules after all, so we get to judge.

But, have you ever walked through a forest and been overwhelmed by a sense of the life around you? A sense of kinship with the beingness of the trees, or the bushes, or… the Earth? Even as a small child –especially as a small child, still mesmerized by the bedtime stories my father had read me the night before- I would stop beside a bush offering me berries and thank it for the gift. I’m not sure who I was thanking exactly; Nature was still populated by ‘who’ rather than ‘what’ in those days. It was only when I started school that I realized there were other ways of looking at the world.

But I never really lost the feeling that I was not alone in a forest, or even a city park; I still felt the loneliness of a city tree, its roots buried under concrete, and sharing the earth with pipes and wires; its closest companion, if there was one, was likely a stone’s throw or more away.

Of course, over the years, I realized my awareness varied with my mood -more akin to Goldilocks’ experience with the three bears’ porridge: although I had preferences, I could live with the rest.

I suppose this is all by the way of an explanation of my special relation to a specific plant: a huckleberry bush as it turned out. There is a trail I used to run after work, or on weekends if there wasn’t too much snow or rain. It was an uneven, rocky path around a little lake with trees whose roots occasionally surfaced for a look around. It was a dangerous path in some areas: especially slippery in the rain, with the roots hidden under fallen leaves in the autumn, or disguised by deep shadows in the summer. It was a stress reliever though, requiring constant vigilance instead of brooding on the day’s problems.

One late summer afternoon many years ago, I found myself particularly anxious about some problem from work and thought a run might help me. It was one of those days when everything seemed to amplify my problems, however: the trail was too muddy, there were too many deep shadows obscuring the roots on the path, and the occasional branch that had fallen across the route became not a fresh challenge, but something purposely placed there to annoy me.

On that day, I found myself more distracted by my problems than usual and, staring resolutely inward, I tripped over a root lying in heavy shadows. I reached for something to save me from falling, and grabbed a lonely bush quietly watching me from beside the path.

It stayed rooted in the ground, however, but when I pushed it back off the path, I noticed just how broken and mangled its stems now were. As I tried to move it to a more upright position, it swayed and fell backwards into the soil behind. My hands were dirty with the mud and residue from the broken stems and as I wiped everything off from my shirt, I noticed there were a few unripe huckleberries still clinging to it.

For some reason this really bothered me. The plant had endured the winter, its roots storing the energy of the previous year in hopes of spreading its seed this summer -in hopes of simply staying alive and doing the only thing it knew how to do: grow and propagate. And now its plans and provisions for an entire generation had been torn away: a whole family was ruined by a senseless accident.

I was suddenly embarrassed about the reasons for my run; my own anxiety seemed unworthy -petty in comparison… My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white: Lady Macbeth’s reprimand of her husband’s anxiety about killing King Duncan flitted through my head as I tried, unsuccessfully, to assuage my guilt.

My time at work buried me for the next few weeks and it wasn’t until early September that I was able to revisit the trail. I’m not sure what I expected to have happened to the plant, but I still felt upset about it -guilty, I suppose; I had the crazy notion that I should at least commemorate its passing with a memorial of some sort -a little cairn of stones, perhaps. So as I ran along the trail, I stopped whenever I saw an unusual rock and picked it up, throwing it away if I saw another that might be more appropriate. I could only manage two of them, though, and it occurred to me how silly carrying rocks as I ran would appear to anybody I passed.

But, as I approached the funerary site, the trappings of death I thought I’d see were hardly in evidence. In fact, had I not remembered the unusual shape of an aging stump a few feet behind it, I might never have been sure I’d actually found the crime scene. For sure there was the rotting detritus of dead branches hanging from it like wooden icicles, but interspersed between them were tiny new leaves -little green babies poking up amongst the stubble that had almost managed to stand upright again. I put the two stones at the mangled base and smiled at the miracle I was witnessing.

I still run the trail, of course, and each time marvel at the huckleberry bush now standing as proudly as a veteran. And when I pass, I whisper to it, and sometimes reach out to touch it as our worlds converge.

I’m not at all sure it knows it’s me who passes with a touch, me who whispers to its leaves. The rocks at its feet are now covered in moss, insensate as ever, and the only purpose they ever served was mine. In fact, I’m probably the only one who notices the bush standing silently beside the path. And yet, each time I pass, I remember that we are the friends who once helped each other.

Perhaps that is enough…

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