May 23, 2010

In the hour and a half it took us to walk through the woods today, about 87,500 gallons of oil poured out of BP’s ruptured Deep Horizon well into the Gulf of Mexico, and in the coming week the last Hummer H3, that arch-symbol of humanity’s earth-indifferent, oil-addicted narcissism, will roll off the assembly line -- ironically at the Shreveport, Louisiana, GM plant -- and it feels like something is about to happen, and it feels like nothing is going to change.

Everywhere in the woods are signs of insatiable hunger: Leaves notched by insects. Random paths of leaf tracers tunneled through broad leaves. Spiders crouched on webs or on top of leaves, waiting. Metallic green beetles mating and feeding.



But the hunger found in the woods is limited by need, curbed by the physical limits of jaw strength and stomach size, necessitated by biology. Human hunger is a different thing.

When all we want is more, our lives spin out of balance, out of control, and we destroy everything near us. And given the reach of our powerful technologies, everything is near us. Lao Tzu wrote, “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.” But we distrust. We distrust, mainly, that we can maintain the ties necessary for survival, and, like a spoiled teenager, have come to hate those we depend on. Absorbed, as we are, in a society grounded in the illusion of independence, we fear our need for other people. Haunted by our fear of poverty, we impoverish ourselves even more and deepen our cravings.



The current fashionable economic model views consumers as amoral beings who make decisions based solely on rational self-interest, but there are many of us who wonder about the morality of our choices, and many of us find it more and more impossible to ignore the damage caused by our endless consuming. Many of us are coming to realize that, like the disease that shared the name, consumption is laying waste to our only planet’s body.

I hear from some people that we can’t blame BP or Transocean or any corporation for the devastation that is occurring in the Gulf, because we all use oil and, so they argue, unless we are willing to give up all use of petroleum immediately – an act which they know would be impossible to achieve – we shouldn’t complain. But an obsessive emphasis on personal responsibility, to the exclusion of larger political and social forces, is the main weapon that polluting corporations like BP use against the rest of the world. If everybody’s responsible, then nobody’s responsible, and the status quo can remain intact.



When you are alert, you can’t help but be humbled every time you walk in the woods.

Sometimes you feel dwarfed by the size and age of the trees or by the resilience of the life that persists in spite of storms and drought: spiders who quickly re-spin their webs after a rainstorm; mayapples and red chestnuts turning a blotchy yellow with their leaf tips dried and brown, and still thriving; grape vines looping from tree to tree – carrying the memory in their curves of old trees now fallen and completely rotted to earth.



Today, it is the miracle of plants drawing on the sunlight that falls freely through the forest canopy that is humbling to me. How clever are we, really, to have spun these vast webs of highways and networks that refrigerate food for the 1,500 miles it takes to carry our dinners from field to plate? Our food is soaked in the oil that is destroying human and non-human lives throughout the Gulf. Our vast webs, unlike the spider’s, take away more from the world than they give. The plants in the woods gather sun and rain to make their own energy and release only oxygen, and all of us would do well to carry this lesson with us, acknowledging our dependence on all of the life around us, and finding ways to not only sustain that life, but to help it flourish, long into the future.

“You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough,” William Blake wrote. Watching the oil geyser in the Gulf, many more of us are beginning to realize that what we are seeing is what more than enough looks like.



Words by Stephen Black
Photos by Jenn Allmon

To see more photos from May 23, please click here.

January 17, 2010

Winter reveals all that is broken in the woods.

For example:
a tall dead tree,
the lowest and only surviving limb
maybe 25 feet high,
stands witness


beside its snapped top,
which lies on the ground in pieces
like a shattered attic statue.


Another tree trunk lies near the trail,


woodpecker holes bored in rows along its side.


The ground is saturated from the thaw and yesterday’s rain.
Muddy water squishes up beneath every step.

The further we go into the woods,
the less muddy it gets,


but throughout the woods lie deep puddles
in the craters of downed trees
who’ve otherwise disappeared with time.


In spite of the mud, people have come out to the park,
dog paw prints and shoe prints stamped into the mud.


Human voices echo through the edge of the woods:
an agonized sasquatch yell from the golf course,
a triumphant group yell from the Greensward,
a teenage girl on a cellphone trailing behind her mother
(She says, “We’re on the trail”).

And people are not the only increased
kind of animal life in the woods. There are more birds
than usual: mostly sparrows, woodpeckers, robins,
chickadees and blue jays.

From time to time we can hear blue jay distress
cries from somewhere in the woods, hidden.




White fungi, each individual aureole
like round ice crystals reaching out thin tendrils,
stretches down a thin dead tree’s barkless trunk,
which provides a temporary rest for another dead tree,
this one fallen, propped in a crotch
near the top of the broken trunk.



A little further along, a thin living leaning tree
bears the black spiraling scar of a vine
that has long since died or been pulled loose.


Along the trail are tangled vines and briars.


On one tree, vines loosely twist around one another,

like a braided rope unraveling,
swagging from the trunk.



A fragment of dead
copper-colored vine wraps
around a green briar,
like an Egyptian snake bracelet.



From time to time we pass nubby barked trees,
looking like so many imitation Angkor Wats.

On another tree, a depressing display
that only the most love-blinded nature lover can appreciate:



bright green English Ivy
and ropy, hairy poison ivy vines intertwined.


And then.
A nearby distress cry from jays is the first sign.

I think at first that maybe someone
on the trail ahead of us has a dog
that has upset the jays,
but a huge swoosh of wings reveals the truth:
a barred owl,
now perched on a limb,
watches us where we have stopped still.


The owl is silent
and we watch each other
for awhile,
in silence,
none of us moving more than necessary,
for maybe five minutes.

I try my best to silence my thoughts
and not let them interfere with what is here
at this moment,
to stand still instead and experience:
the round head and ringed eyes,
the streaked belly.
The mottled wings.
The feeling of being studied
so coolly,
so closely.


By something so unworldly,
so far removed from this world
of golfers and cars and cell phones.

Until at last it decides
it has had enough of us and flies away,
south and west of us.
We try to follow it,
only to lose it in the tangle of limbs,
and giving up at last we walk away.

Neither one of us has seen an owl out here before.

Walking on the trail,
I remember the pileated woodpecker
from a couple weeks ago,
and for a moment I get mystical,
or maybe it’s just sentimental,
and I can’t help thinking that simply
by making ourselves present,
we are creating a space for these animals
to make themselves known to us.

But there’s too much to see and hear
and feel
to fool with mysticism in the woods.

Maybe it’s the wet,
but the lichens look greener than usual.




A trunk lies beside the path,
looking like some petrified ancient frog,
its surface whorled like driftwood,
the lichen making it look frog green.


At a place where the woods are edged
by a trail and the abandoned roadway,


we cross a ditched creek,
green lichen growing along its stone sides.

Back into the woods as soon as we can find a path:


Long fronded lichens on top of a downed tree,
the bottom side rowed with thin mushrooms,
chocolate brown on the trunk side, tan on the underside.



A jumble of logs,
tossed into something like a pile beside the trail.
Lime green lichen and rusty orange fungi,


their colors almost too intense to believe
they’re natural,
grow on one discarded log.

Another log hosts mushrooms,
one of them uncannily shaped like a human

– though it may be closer to the Michelin man.

Along the trail, we come across a scaly-barked persimmon tree,

its fruit long ago gleaned
and I make a note
to come back this way in the fall
and get my share
before the possums and the squirrels
and the raccoons
can eat them all.


Nearing the wood’s edge
we hear the owl cry for the first time.

It had been silent the whole time
we had watched each other
and while it was flying away.

We stop, listen, move on.

But not for long.

A few feet further on the trail we are stopped.
There, on the leaves in the middle of the trail,
someone has dropped a gold cigarette lighter,
an old-fashioned zippo lighter
like my pawpaw used to carry,
heavy with a flip top
and thumb-wheel to strike the flint.


Etched onto the side facing up is an owl.




Words by Stephen Black
Pictures by Jenn Allmon