You return from an Autumn Equinox retreat above a Scottish loch flooded by heavy downpours of rain, birch, alder and ash half-drowned in the rising waters. The two lochs in the glen are only a few bucketsful away from becoming one. You return from a week reflecting on interconnectedness and kindness: how they are two hands in one body, the only body you have – yours.
You return to a change in the light, a lowering of intensity, the trees drying and shedding in response, looking pleasingly dishevelled. You return to the news that someone (perhaps a young boy, perhaps not) has felled the famous Sycamore Gap tree fifteen miles west on Hadrian’s Wall. The reports say, under cover of Storm Agnes, he went out with a chainsaw and cut down the photogenic sycamore in its wee hollow in this most visited stretch of the wall – a beloved tree that survived its elevation to icon and cliché, even survived Kevin Costner mistaking Northumberland for Nottingham, but couldn’t survive the fury of one 16 year old boy.
The county, the whole country, are angry and grieving. Everywhere you look there are elegiac photographs, au naturel and photoshopped, backlit by wide blue sky, a silvery moon or the dancing northern lights. And there are as many of the hero tree fallen, stump cut clean, a plastic police cordon placed around its base. People are travelling to the site to pay their respects, laying flowers as after a death.
You try to imagine what might have compelled the boy – or anyone – to commit such a dramatic act of violence, what seeded or sparked the fury inside him as he carried the heavy chainsaw across the fields and up the hill in the dark and pulled the cord, angling the machine, to make the first cut. He knew what he was doing. But what did he really want to achieve, what was he asking for?
As well as for the tree, the tenderness you feel is for him. How was he failed? How might he be healed? Him, and all the other young people rightly enraged, facing their uncertain futures at the mercy of a system of injustice, corruption and neglect. No one is caring for them – or for our trees – and what they symbolise, what hopes they carry. Roger Deakin said that ‘trees are the subconscious of the landscape’. In that light, what was the boy driven to destroy? What couldn’t he live with?
How much does anyone know about their own shadows and blind spots?
A chainsaw is aptly named – all of us caught up in the chain of harm resulting from a system that cuts down trees on an industrial scale, scarring the planet’s lungs, mining the earth for their buried ancestors, fossil fuel. While all the people express outrage for the loss of the tree and revile whoever caused its destruction, why are they not crying as long and loud for all the world’s trees cut down, not planted, diseased, lost – the landscape’s subconscious broken and guilty, ill at ease?
The chain of heartbreak links the beloved tree and the space left behind, links that with the kindness and care it surely seeds – tenderness for trees and boys who cut down trees because no one’s listening to what they need. This is a precious space for something to change, for the root system to shift, be realigned, so that, out of the trauma, new shoots, something stronger you can’t imagine yet, can grow to hold us all together. Nature knows what is needed, what we need.
Is the Sycamore Gap tree a scapegoat, the one that must suffer, a symbol of all the trees humans have damaged over the centuries? It would be too overwhelming for people to mourn for all the world’s trees, all of nature in its current fragile state. Might this be a chance to begin again?
Or is the boy (or the man, or whoever – still a mystery…) our scapegoat, a whipping post punished for all the harm we do unwittingly, inevitably colluding in imbalance, violence and denial through our dependence on a broken capitalist structure, built on inequality, greed, fossil fuel extraction and unsustainable ‘endless’ growth? What if the cutting down of one tree led to an end to the needless cutting down of all trees?
What if you just stopped and said ‘No, not in my name’?
You feel the hurt of it, a pang in your belly. Face the pain of loss, no walking away, no righteous anger. The loss of the tree is every loss you’ve ever suffered – and will suffer. Incalculable, inexorable, it’s all the world’s losses. Another reminder – how many do you need? – that everything that has a beginning has an ending. Even the most loved tree, the most loved being, will die.
Take your rawness, your thoughts swirling in the wind around you, into the woods for a medicine walk. What you need now is to be with the trees.