What happened to that tree? Our favorite tree?
Shifting landscapes jolt our sense of place, identity, and even belonging. They fracture our sense of time. What rooted us to our sense of self-in-place is no longer a touchstone for identity and belonging.
Where's that special place we raised our cubs? What happened to that old Northern red oak where we used to spend afternoons swinging on in the summertime, or the bridge over the river where we savored our first kiss? Gone. That stand of white pines where we sat for hours nursing a heartache? - Destroyed by wildfires. That field of sunflowers where our baby took her first, teetering steps among the butterflies? Bulldozed. The forest path down by the stream where our curious canine discovered a fox den with pups just venturing out for the first time? Denuded. Those gorgeous places and those unrepeatable moments of discovery, wonder, and joy - all gone! They center and ground us in a way no photo can quite capture.
When those natural landscapes shift or change altogether, we grieve them. We long for the experience of solace and gentle embrace they gave us, the particular slant of sunlight and the timbre of water splashing rhythmically that plays over and over in our hearts. They resonated within us, spoke to our essential being, and now they're gone.
Thinking we are entitled to unchanging landscapes promotes an illusory sense of impermanence. We might think, "That river will always be there. The mountain will never move. That forest or fertile farmland is a fixture." But rivers become dry beds through pollution and drought, mountains shift with fracking and seismic activity, forests can become denuded, and farmland can become barren wasteland through abuse. This is why measuring our own timescapes against a backdrop of changing landscapes can lead to a profound melancholia. The term "Solastalgia" refers to a stress/anxiety or nostalgia/melancholy brought on by significant change or degradation of environment. It is a calamity akin to losing a best friend.
Erica Berry, an eco-writer from the Pacific NW living with the threat of the long overdue Cascadia earthquake, reminds us that our bodily timescape and the always-morphing energy of the biosphere are not necessarily in sync. "The concept of an unchanging wilderness - its panoramas predictable, its seasons unrolling like backdrops in a school play - is a fiction... The borders we have come to expect between the seasons have slid off their axis. Hundred-year floods are happening every year. The metronome has gone awry... To love the trees, to live among them, is to reconcile myself not only to my impermanence, but to theirs. To see the environment not as a backdrop, but a limb. Change is inevitable there as in our own bodies. What is love if not the muscle that helps steady us in the face of it?" (Erica Berry, "The Fault of Time," Emergence https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-fault-of-time/)
Many people fear and despise change whether it inheres in their philosophy/religion, their timescape, their landscape, or in their own embodied soul. The fear may arise more because of the nature of change - and its perceived erratic metronomic signature - than its inevitability.
The nature of change has been a hot topic since the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. Heraclitus (530-470 BCE) posited the very nature of Being was change, but we resist the idea mightily. Our God-language - canonizing absolute immutability of the divine - doesn't help much, although process theologians and philosophers have done some noteworthy work celebrating dynamism. There is a persistent trust in perceived permanence, and we ritualize and eulogize it as though it were the law of the land. Who/what is our "rock?" (As though rocks aren't subject to change through wind and water?) "Always" or "forever" seem to be the words that seal the deal. However, if quantum physics speaks to the nature of reality at all, the nature of change relates to the "observer effect" - and reality is shifting - more a possibility, not determined. Reality is in the balance until we observe it.
Wait. Perhaps there is beauty in change - if we will observe it.
When in August, 2020, a deadly land hurricane called a derecho decimated our home - and over 90,000 sq. miles of pristine Midwestern beauty - I wept for nearly two years, especially amidst the arboreal hospice it left in its wake. (Laura Weber, "Seeking Ssshh," Kosmos, https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/seeking-shhh/) I lamented the uprooting and destruction of our trees in a way my soul will never recover from, tied as I was to particular arbor-elders in my neighborhood, and centuries-old arbor-elder friends throughout the bioregion. I grieved their loss like no other in my life, including my canines and human kin. I grieved the absence of their magnificent beauty, their protection, the stability they provided the flooded/eroding earth, along with the purity of the water and the breathable air, and home and habitat for our creature-kin. They were the very lungs of our bioregion. It was a calamity for our geo-identity, and a loss of our communal home for all our relations. For a long time, we couldn't see it any other way but as loss. We sang a requiem for the trees.
Utterly disoriented as we were when trees were gone and shadows fell oddly, when runoff and erosion flooded areas once rife with life, it was our very being that seemed threatened. "I feel like I'm dying," my neighbor exclaimed, when she sat weeping among the debris of decimated trees. "I feel like I'm lost. And dying." This is when dry winds, unimpeded by arboreal windbreak, rape the surface soil, and our own soul. We dreaded the effects of a changing landscape, and feared that we would perish - along with our wild-kin - in its wake.
Once the tree debris was cleared and set to compost, or formed into Hügelkultur - a regenerative technique for constructing organic habitat for garden beds using rotting wood and other organic materials - life began to thrive in new and gorgeously unexpected ways. Creature-kin discovered new habitat, and bio-diverse fungal varietals sought out mycelial networks for re-homing. Saplings found sunlight plentiful and natural water catchments at the ready. Color-laden perennial ground-cover sprang up, birdsong filled the understory, and wildflowers appeared like visions of phoenixes rising from the ashes. Saplings began their descent into fertile, black soil, and their ascent into sun-splashed fields. Life finds a way.
Today, in the vistas of fertile imagination, acute sensory perception, and the long timescapes sweeping across millennia, we can apprehend a sort of spiritual alchemy that is endemic to cosmic, bio-dynamic and personal change. If we cultivate a patient, bio-curious and insatiable sensorium, we find a new consciousness thrusts itself into our faltering awareness. It is like a kaleidoscopic invitation, a shifting and melding of lenses to a new reality. We begin to perceive a distillation and reintegration of Materia Prima - prime/first matter. We observe, and a resplendent reality emerges in the confluence. We notice its consistent energetic signature over time - very gradually, incrementally, more protracted than our posthuman pace of instantaneous change. This Anima Mundi, "World Soul," life force, Chi/Qi, Love, Spirit - whatever our language allows - is thrumming through shifting images of landscape and timescape, creating ever-new, ever-changing experiences of Beauty, Goodness, Truth, Holiness, Life. And WE are changed in the process, composted, re-homing in our metamorphosis.
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