Ancient tree, I sit beneath you, toes in the water, just as your toes are in the water too. Aware of your life, your breath. Your pace steadies me. One long slow breath in during the day, one exhalation every night. Your calm steadies me, your life reassuring. What wisdom will you share if we choose to listen. To slow our breath and consider our lives.
Do you still feel your sisters and brothers connected to you through myriad systems of fungi? Do you know how many have fallen? Those that have stood beside you for generation after generation. Do you feel grief, as I do, for their number? So many now lost.
If we were to commemorate your life, what would you recount? Life as a tiny seed, a speck, one of millions produced each year? Cracked open by a sharp beak, spared being eaten. Maybe you fell to the woodland floor into ash. A cool burn from your people, beginning your life in pot ash as fertilizer, as many of your brethren have ended their lives. Will their offspring be spared?
Your people, forever grateful for your shade, and as you aged, for your hollows, for the slope of your trunk that allows access to the branches, easy picking of the possums hiding within. For the hollows within, where bees swarm producing honey, for your timber and the warmth it generates, for your branches fashioned into digging sticks for the earth. The old people surely loved you and honoured your ancient soul, you loving and protecting them in turn.
The newcomers, the white folk, so quick. Always racing. Do they see how you still try and shade them, how you still offer branches to keep them warm, how you are a home to so much life? Will they see you now you are so few in number?
But what of your life. You have raised so many families. From the ants crawling up your bark, the spiders nestled under ribbons, the sap suckers within the leaves – thousands of insects you shelter. And they in turn provide food. The pardalottes, picking over the leaves, keeping you clean. I wonder if their ministrations tickle your skin? The parrots and cockatoos, roosting in your limbs, cracking your fruits, nibbling your seeds. The possums and gliders, deep in your breast, nestled close to your heart. The bats at your fingertips and joints, wombats and echidnas at your feet.
Surely, old nurturer, you have raised an ecosystem. Be proud ancient one, for you have lived a life of great service to all.
How shall we honour a life so well lived? How shall we ensure your generations live on? The life you have shared, your generosity, should be acknowledged, mourned and honoured.
In our haste to erase the terror of the fire, the fear and the destruction, let us remember the way of the ancient trees. To slow our breathing. One long slow breath in, one long slow breath out. Let us mourn their passing and allow them to stay where they have fallen. Remembered, honoured by continuing to provide ongoing life. To feed the soil with their bodies, providing more homes in death. These old girls, (for surely they are women who have nurtured all their lives) must surely wish this in their passing.
So now as we begin to rebuild, slow your breathing. A nest box is a poor second to life nestled in an ancient tree, but a necessary interim. Can their lives, now hollow logs, be put to use, supporting invertebrates, fish and reptiles, echidnas and frogs.
Taungurung plan in time frames of 7 generations – 200 years. Inconceivable, until I consider my grandfather, born in 1906, and young Juliette, aged one, likely to live until 2110 – lives I have touched, spanning 200 years. To the ancient trees, this is still just a blink. Let us plan for a long future – not this rampant pace of using every resource available.
Surely this is one of their lessons if we choose to listen. Slow your breathing, slow your pace, stay the course and honour the ancients with choosing to nurture. Choose to put the lives of nature on equal footing as our own. Surely our very existence depends on this.
Journal by Cathy Olive
Development Manager
