The Stickiness Of Touch
Ruth wallen
/ Author
Over forty years ago, after initial training and work experience in environmental science, where I read and wrote responses to stacks of government documents that supposedly addressed the environmental impacts of proposed development projects, I turned to art to explore the values that informed these assessments. Much of my work has centered near my home in San Diego. For more than a decade I have been walking with dying trees, bearing witness to the increasing losses of trees due to the intertwined impacts of urbanization, globalization, and climate change. I began without a plan, but found myself following the same trails repeatedly, gradually expanding my range both northward and eastward. I invite you to accompany me on a series of walks I took along the Shanahan Trail in the foothills of the Front Range during a four-month sojourn in Boulder Colorado. Before winter turned into spring, a small fire, known as the NCAR fire, burned about 200 acres proximate to the trail..
BY RUTH WALLEN
(revised from a longer piece published in WEAD magazine #13 “The Art of Empathy”)
April 9, 2022
Dear Tree,
Your yellow band caught my eye and drew me to you. I stood beneath the shelter of your branches, feeling your presence, and slowly reached out to touch the band oozing with sticky sap, trying to synchronize my breath with yours, but the girdle all the way around your trunk prevented your flow.
Oh tree, I am so sorry. Your needles are so green. This will be a slow death. The girdle around your trunk has sliced through your veins, your phloem, so that nutrients can no longer flow up from your roots to support new growth, nor can the sugars that you create through the process of photosynthesis flow down to your roots. Instead, your sap is dribbling down your trunk, your bark encrusted with your blood. There is no tourniquet to apply to this wound. You will bleed slowly until you die. Oh, dear tree, I weep with you.
Your girdle is part of a strategy the foresters use to prevent the conflagrations that are killing your kin, including your relatives that have stood for hundreds of years. They have felled some of your neighbors but chosen you for a slow death so that you will stand for some years as a snag. If only your slow death would give you time to share your riches, your carbon and nutrients, through the mycelial connection in your roots that binds you with your fellows. However, the girdling of your trunk has stopped the flow. Maybe it is all my own projection, but the sap encrusting your trunk feels like tears.
And yes, somehow, I know that in your own way, you feel. Indigenous peoples have always known what western science denied until recently. It is easier to cut you down without realizing that along with the fungal symbionts entwined in your roots, you sense, hear, touch, perhaps even see. But now your veins have been severed, sensations from limb can no longer reach your roots, nor can your roots communicate with your limbs.
Even if I don’t have an alternative to offer as to how you are being treated, I think it is important to recognize the violence of the severing of connections. I want to offer thanks, my sincere gratitude, for all that you have and will endure as you continue to serve your community, as you remain standing, first shedding your needles, your small branches, and then your larger limbs all the while providing homes for birds and small mammals, a storage place for pine nuts, and more. Even when you fall, other animals or reptiles will find shelter. Your log will hold more moisture, gradually decomposing and returning nutrients to the soil. So yes, taking the long view, your relationship to your surroundings will remain intact.
Yet, in this moment, the girdle that contorts your body, that constricts you, is a taut blindfold emblematic of the mindlessness wrought by settler colonialism—the mindfulness that permits indiscriminate rupturing of connections, the mindlessness that allows for the continuous extraction of riches, the mindlessness that assumes that the forest will always continue giving without humanity offering anything in return, and the mindlessness of indiscriminate dumping of the leftovers without ever stopping to think about where they are going—the consequences to the air, the water, and the climate.
Dear tree, the pain of your girdle haunts me. Thank-you tree for providing me a space to feel into that pain, that aching grief, and touch the vulnerability of my tender heart.
Oh Tree, I am so sorry.
April 25, 2022
Dear Tree,
I am grateful to visit you again. How are you doing? Your green foliage looks fully alive. I’ve now learned that despite the freshness of your wound you were not girdled recently, but last November! The small backhoe I saw on my last visit was there for trail maintenance. Thinning of the forest was completed last year. The processes of life and death are so much slower in trees.
Walking this trail, I realize how much work the foresters have done. They are creating clumps of trees interspersed with small meadows to recreate the look inscribed in the photographs taken by early settlers. We counted the rings on one of the stumps. The tree was 112 or 113 years old. By human terms a good lifetime, for a Ponderosa pine quite short. Many of the stumps were of a similar size, some a bit smaller.
At the turn of the last century, in 1900, likely shortly before your birth, the population of Boulder was only 6,000 people. Now the population has grown by almost 100,000. You must have witnessed such rapid change during your lifetime. The temperature in Colorado has warmed by 2.5 degrees in the last fifty years. Correspondingly, soil moisture has decreased. Maybe it is merciful that you are dying when you are.
Dear tree, I brought a friend today. We veered off the main trail, to sit in meditation, sharing compassion with the trees that burned in the NCAR fire. The periphery of the burn area was very much coming back to life, the black ashes covered by a carpet of green. Moving inward, the fire burned hotter, singeing the needles of most of the pines, although some still had greenery on their uppermost branches. We sat in the charnel ground, a very rocky area of steep slopes, where the trees were never thinned and the fire reached their crowns, reducing them to black skeletons. Foresters suggest that this fire was very much like a controlled burn or the fires, whether natural or human-made, that occurred before the arrival of the European settlers.
We came to the charnel ground to relate with death, to relate with fire as an integral part of the forest life cycle. We sat in the blackness, each on a rock exposed by the fire, next to a small weeping tree, its sap dripping down the charred bark. To the left, two tall trees—skeletons of trunks and branches, still had so much presence. Many of these trees will be standing for a decade or more, attracting insects and providing valuable habitat as snags. Time moves very slowly for trees.
We also came to relate with life, to the permeability of death and life. Throughout our practice we could hear the cascading gobbling of turkeys as well as the piercing cry of an occasional hawk. New life literally unfolded at our feet, the grass emerging as curled ovals–brilliant emerald against the dark ground.
Dear tree, sitting on steep slopes we had a splendid view of the city of Boulder—houses like boxes tucked among evergreen green and deciduous grey, reservoirs glistening blue, an old power plant rising in the distance. In one moment, the fire felt like the universe’s big NO, mighty and wrathful in its destructiveness. In another moment it felt like a cleansing, an opportunity, or a demand, to start fresh.
Trees, what is fire asking of us? What human habits need to change so that you can live? So that we all can live? What do we need to let go of, to renounce? What will we be forced to let go of? Scientists tell us that there have been more days of extreme fire danger in first four months of this year than in any previous year. A Boulder forester I spoke with described the relentless stress of fighting five fires during this record-breaking dry April.
Dear tree it is not easy to sit with a dying forest. But we recognize that unless we are willing to feel into the suffering, and willing to open our hearts, we cannot come into relationship with you. Unless we come into embodied relationship with the forest, unless we can come into sacred relationship with the forest, it will not be possible to offer proper care. We are so grateful to be able to sit with you, even amid the blackness.
April 28, 2022
Dear Tree,
I circle around you and offer pumpkin seeds. May I touch you? May I touch your wound, your girdle? May I stand with you, may we try to breathe together as we have on previous visits?
Oh tree, I realize that I have reached out to you instinctively. Appalled by the gash around your trunk, the depth of the cut, I wanted to palpably share my presence, my heart. Touch seemed like a more possible form of communication than words. But I realize now that although I approached slowly, I never asked permission. I never stopped long enough to fully drop my projections of what you might be feeling, to fully sense into your presence and tune to your energy fields. I reached out not to feel the roughness of your bark, your toughness that protects you from the elements or from the harm that another being might cause, but to touch your naked interior.
Do I have a right to touch? Are my fingers soft and tender on your yellow flesh or are they causing further pain, violating a part of your being that was never meant to be touched?
Oh tree, what habits give me the privilege to touch without asking permission first? I profess to touch in caring concern, but is that how you receive the contact? Is my proclamation of love too facile? How do I build relationship? You stand here, always present. You have no ability to turn away. You cannot run or hide or reach out to touch back.
But yet, you leave an imprint. Your sap is sticky. As I withdraw my hand, my fingers stick together, stained with your sap, a stain that lingers, that is not easy to wash off.
Closing my fingers in on themselves, I feel a certain relief. Asking permission means not only touching your rawness, but my own. Oh tree, I cannot know what you’re feeling, but I know the violation of unwanted touch. Dear tree, I am so sorry. I did not mean to cause you pain.
But that is too easy; I want to take those words back. Professions of innocence, only cause more pain. Did anyone mean to get us into a situation where every year is hotter than the one before, where every year more beings wilt from a myriad of fevers?
Oh tree, I cannot know what you feel. Even as I ask permission to touch your wound, I am not sure whether to trust that the subtle shift in energy I feel as I open more fully to your energy field is indeed permission to touch.
Can I believe what I sense? From childhood I have been taught not to trust the haptic. Touch was untrustworthy, unscientific. Too often professions of gentleness and care foreshadowed a touch that only caused more pain. But risking touch is the only way to possibly come into relationship with you, a relationship that is demanding different ways of knowing.
My fingertips quiver. Although the lemon yellow of your girdled flesh appeared soft to my eyes, I am now stuck to your hard, impenetrable wood. How can I feel into this solidity?
If I pull hard enough, my hand separates from your wound. Looking at my upturned palm, I see the stains of our relationship. This is the hand that reached out to touch you. Yet this hand, the human hand, is responsible for your wound.
Thank-you, dear tree. This is all so sticky. It is challenging to stay present. Nevertheless, I am so grateful to be able to stand with you today, to have touched you, to have been touched by you, to continue to labor in the uncertainty of our precarious relationship, and to be mindful of the ways in which my fingers may stain whatever I touch next.
_______________
Thanks to the Arapahoe, Cheyenne and Ute, the traditional guardians of the unceded territory on which I walked, the Frederick P. Lenz Residential Fellowship in Buddhism and American Culture and Values for support of this project, and to Emily Takahashi for accompanying me and practicing together.
All images were created from photographs taken on or near the Shanahan Trail in Boulder, Colorado in April of 2022. The photomontages offer a variety of glimpses and perspectives. They are a labor of love, an effort to convey the visceral sense and vibrancy of life that I experienced.