I lack the mentoring influence of solid elder influences, and in recent years, as metaphysical battles have happened on the psychic plain, I’ve realized how much this has limited me in life. I’ve done well to be unmentored, by my true universal abilities are largely unmassaged from the raw potential dirtgod nature I began as. Because of this, I’ve been talking to a few trees a lot more lately. This began one time on the hill behind my girlfriend’s compound, where I wrote a haiku in my head about leaving some haiku unwritten for humans so that they could float up for the oak trees to enjoy instead. The trees seemed to flaunt in the golden hour light in that moment, and it seemed that rather than just writing my narrow-minded human word poems for the trees, I should ask them questions. I’ve found it helpful, but it’s also pretty limited because the Monacan language was spoken around the trees around me for thousands and thousands of years. That language is a dead tongue for the most part now, sterilized from its speakers by missionaries and “Indian” schools. It’s been mostly English spake here the past couple hundred years, so most of the young trees recognize my human words. But the really old trees are only one generation removed from a much longer history of Monacan language, which they understand much more deeply at a root level. None of our root words speaking English in these woods I wander actually match the roots of the trees, geographically. This is one of the great limitations of this American experiment - that colonists came and conquered, decimating the cultures that existed here already, and filling those spaces with selectively curated immigration influxes. So though I don’t speak the trees’ native language, I talk at them, asking questions, sharing poems that blossom in my mind that don’t feel too stupid to share. Telling the old trees deep off the beaten and clear cut path is the most intimidating open mic environment possible. You know your words are self-important, because you’ve known not even a fraction of what those elder beacons of old knowledge contain. So I don’t share poems as often, instead asking questions to them, leaving them quartz crystals at their base as an offering, to show my gratitude and hopefully unlock their advice. I wish I had an old human who knew their words better than me, who could help me hear it more easily. But lacking that humane elder, I’ll just keep looking up to these handful of old trees tucked away in the semi-wild, and soak up as much wisdom as my dumb ass can.
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