167. TREES ARE ALIVE by un'Americana a Venezia

 

Preferisco la vitalità del verde delle piante alla caducità e alla precarietà dei cromatismi dei fiori. Ho sempre pensato che il Giardino dell’Eden sia inebriato della frescura degli alberi, testimoni muti ed immobili delle nostre vicende. L’autrice di questo post mi ricorda che: "Se vuoi imparare la pazienza, cerca la compagnia degli alberi." Anche il sottofondo musicale del blog in questo periodo è tratto dalla colonna sonora di un film che parla di un albero, quello della vita. (RR)

 "Men must not cut down trees.  There is a God."  So noted Septimus Warren Smith on a fine summer's day in Regent's Park as he sat on a bench with his Italian wife, Lucrezia.  This in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway which I have begun reading in this season of budding, flowering, leafing trees, those silent, taken-for-granted guardians of life who conserve heat deep in their roots and only seem dead in winter.  Were it not for the covering of trees on the planet, the climate would indeed change overnight.  Acting as the Earth's lungs, forests are our direct link to well-being.  I keep noticing Woolf's reference to trees, to their larger significance in the scheme of things.  In fact, trees have always been a solid point of reference in all the cultures and religions of the world.  They represent both knowledge and life itself.  Their roots plunge into the earth and bring up nutrients, from which we and other creatures benefit in terms of refuge, shade and fruit.  Their spreading branches, like arms, reach towards the heavens and pull down reassuring messages.  Like us, trees sprout, grow, have an existence, and eventually die, usually outliving each one of us, but they too are destined, like all physical beings, to return to ash and dust.  Today, not a few trees have become living symbols of hope.  Some have even survived Man's worst acts of violence.  In the U.S., for example, there are two much-loved "Survivor Trees" bearing plaques in praise of their resilience:  One is an 80-year-old American Elm which withstood a powerful truck bomb blast that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City one April morning in 1995; the other is a Callery Pear tree which was reduced to a blackened skeleton, along with six other trees, following the World Trade Center disaster in 2001.  The then-8' tall pear tree now stands at about 30' at the 9/11 Memorial, the tree a living miracle, having also been uprooted by a freak windstorm while it was still recovering in a tree nursery in the Bronx.  Then, too, there is a surviving Olive, typically gnarled, in a byway on the west side of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  It withstood a powerful car bomb blast in May of 1993.  Yet another survivor tree has not been so fortunate:  It is the lone pine of Takata Matsubara Forest in the Iwate Prefecture of northeast Japan, an area once famed for its tree-lined coastline.  Thirty meters tall, it was the only pine left standing out of a group of about 70,000 trees following the tremendous tsunami of 2011.  Civic groups have worked hard to save it, but alas, its roots have been completely rotted by saltwater.  It cannot go on.  It cannot nourish itself.  This is sad news.  We feel for that tree.  We share its agony.  As Septimus realized, sitting on the bench beneath the elms, his mind forever altered by his typically brutal experience of World War I a few years before, ". . . leaves were alive; trees were alive.  And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement."  How wonderful to feel union with a tree.  Julia Butterfly Hill once spent 738 days at the top of a 55 m. tall sequoia in Colorado in order to save its life from loggers.  She won her battle and became a famous "treehugger", a word that is supposed to disparage human beings who honor the lives of our indispensable companions on this living earth and, in so doing, help prevent natural catastrophe.  As Sergeant Joyce Kilmer, killed in action near Ourcy on a summer's day in 1918, concluded in "Trees", his short but sweet tribute, Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.  While he was fighting and dying in the trenches, the sight of trees on the edges of the battlefield were likely his only link to sanity.  What else is there to say on the subject?  Except that maybe poor Septimus wasn't really all that mad.   UN’AMERICANA A VENEZIA