When Tall Trees Fall
Last night I dreamed that some very tall healthy trees, near a public road were cut down. They had been marked for removal for weeks, months in advance. Members of the community had organized to try to save them, but everyone knew there was little chance they would be effective.
Still watching them fall was painful, heartbreaking. The landscape permanently changed. My heart and flesh hurt looking at the freshly amputated stumps.
But just before I woke I looked around and noticed the hundreds of trees still standing, and then, the small saplings, hidden in the shade, that might one day grow tall.
Our work is the same whether we are negotiating eras of progress, stability, instability or retrenchment: To try to protect what is vulnerable, to mourn our losses, to assess what is still standing, and to tend to new growth. That work will cycle through periods that are easier or harder, but the call is always the same.
Our tendency to sort our perceptions into binaries - good times and bad times - to see justice and liberation as a fixed state that can be categorically secured or lost does us a disservice. It can plunge us into hopelessness in the face of loss, and it can tempt us into complacency when some of us are temporarily feeling “protected”. There were millions of people suffering on this earth on the best day of your life. There were millions of people working toward liberation, guarding the vulnerable on the days that the cruelest injustices are handed down.
Good times were never unilaterally good and certainly never permanent. The hard times are never devoid of hope. We must always try to guard the flame through calm weather or wind storms.
When mighty mother trees fall, their resources are sent down through the root networks to nurture and sustain the surviving trees nearby.
I remember the times of challenge, oppression, and horrors that loved ones have faced. My father-in-law took to the hills and fought with the partisans when the Nazi’s took Greece. My mother- and grandmother-in-law mourned their lost friends and family and somehow survived concentration camp. My grandmother and all her sisters got college degrees, even though their father died when they were very young, and they were raised on a farm run by a single, widowed mother. My mother got her tubes tied as soon as she was permitted to do so without her husband’s permission and fled him as soon as she secured her own credit card. Friends who I would eventually bury, anticipated their deaths at die-in’s organized by ACT-UP. Later, an AIDS hospice I volunteered for would transform into residence because life-saving treatments emerged.
Justice is never fixed, always fluid, times are never merely good or bad. There were those that were never allowed the “rights” of record that protected the privileged. There are islands, networks of liberation that live in the shadows during “bad” times. The good times were never as good as the comfortable would like to imagine. Dreams of justice grow in the night. Victories become losses and failures can transform into glory in the blink of an eye. Nothing is fixed and long term outcomes are never what we expect. The future, for good and ill, is always uncertain.
When battles are lost the questions I ask myself alongside the grief are these:
What remains that I might still protect?
What still stands?
What growth can I nurture and support?
On the happiest days of your life, someone nearby was suffering. On the worst days, seeds of joy and freedom may still take root.
