The Tree

June 30, 2025

Greetings from the witness,

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”  Sharon Begley 

I was hiking in the forest, surrounded by green, following a trail that wove between trees and rocks and creeks. There were glimpses of blue between the canopy of leaves.  I could smell living things and the pungent decay of old things making the earth ready for the next generations.

I came to the top of a rise and paused to take a breath.  In the dimmer light of the trail ahead of me I could see thousands of tiny whirlybirds fluttering toward the ground, a swarm of emissaries intent on their mission.  The smell of honeysuckle was thick in the moist air, strands of sunlight pierced the overstory, lit parts of the forest floor in gold ovals.

The philosopher George Berkeley suggested none of this might exist if I wasn’t here seeing it.  That thought crosses my mind from time to time when I am in nature, sensing all of its rich beauty.  I am a poor philosopher, but I don’t believe this world only shows up when animals are around to perceive it.  It leads me to another thought, which has come to fit neatly in my beliefs.

I crunched along the path, littered with the remnants of leaves, twigs, bits of the forest’s detritus.  I listened to the birds calling, the woodpecker drumming, the rustle of something small scurrying away from me in the groundcover.  I came to a small brook and stepped over it, saw small things flittering in that tiny universe.

For many years it’s seemed to me that the purpose of creation is to be noticed.  That all of the unfolding, from the first star to the anonymous flower at my feet, is propelled, moment by moment, in search of being seen and known.  By the starling, by the fawn, by me.  Once I had this thought, I felt compelled to be a part of that destiny. My role is to notice, to see what the universe has presented in my path.

I stopped to drink water and catch my breath, and I sensed a different quiet.  I could hear my own breathing, felt my pulse radiating in me. A bird broke the silence, her partner responded.  I waited, expecting. The next sound that I noticed was the distinct ‘thokk’ noise that I associated with an axe hitting a tree, so loud it had a soft echo.  But it didn’t feel like someone was working, it felt like something startled, crying out. I began walking again, looking to where I’d heard the noise.

I was uphill from the sound, hiking along narrow path on top of a ridge.  The slope below me was dense with green life; thick undergrowth, ropy vines, a chaos of shrub and saplings filling in between towering sentinel trees.

There was quick series of sharp popping noises, a violent staccato, bold contrast to the silence around me. I paused, and for a moment all I heard was the soft rustle of the maple trees whispering above me.  I pushed on up the trail, looking to my left down the slope for some sign of what I heard.  And then there was a long groan, a prehistoric thing protesting something.

I saw it without believing it.  The oak tree was enormous, perhaps eighty feet tall, a huge canopy over the forest.  It moaned again, and the cracks became one long sound, and it shook so hard the trees around moved with it. 

Then it happened, in such an enormous way it was disorienting, as if the whole world was moving.  The tree gave way, released from the strength and legacy that held it upright.  It shuddered, still in its place but its intent was clear.  My thought was that the tree was alive, and now it was moving in the woods, I was seeing some secret mystery that humans were not privy to.

And then the tree fell.  It was graceful, as if it were lying down to rest, pressing against gravity at its own speed, slowly making the way to the earth.  At the same time, it was harsh, it tore at the trees around it, dragging some down with it, crashing and snapping at its neighbors.  It fell into the lower trees and disappeared, and the forest exhaled an enormous sigh.

I stood there a long time, absorbing what I’d seen.  For a moment I wanted to climb down the slope to find the oak, to see where it had fallen, to know what that place looked like. It wasn’t impossible, but the effort of bushwhacking for an hour to pay respects to a tree was too daunting. As I began to walk again it also occurred to me that this was an intimate thing I’d witnessed, and perhaps now the oak would prefer to spend the first moments of its new existence in solitude.

It took some time for me to move again, held still by a holy moment. This tree might have been standing there for a hundred years or more. It had been a part of thousands of sunrises, seen snow and growth and death and summer and lightning and floods and brilliant sunsets and home to countless living things. There was no obvious reason for this morning to be its last, no storm or earth heaving quake or mudslide or fire.  No warning other than its last cry, and then it fell to become something else.  And I was there to see it.

All of this happened.  All of this was experienced by me, heard and smelled and felt. But I wasn’t the important piece in this little drama.  I don’t believe the forest was waiting for me, but simply living out things in its time, all in the hope of expressing its passion, its persistent purpose of being noticed.  And I helped it fulfill that.

I don’t think if the tree had fallen, and I wasn’t there, that the expression would have been moot.  It is possible that all the sound and movement and smell and texture of this morning emanates in other ways, to other things.  It’s possible that the witnesses are everywhere; there are trees and sky and the ghosts of everything that was before.  It’s possible that creation fulfills its purpose only seen by the Creator. 

No matter how small my part may be in how this beauty reveals itself, I intend to keep paying attention. It seems that we too are part of creation, meant to be noticed, but we are more in that equation, we have the honor of noticing too.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”  

W.B. Yeats

Hope this finds you taking part,

David

Copyright © 2025 David Smith