Listen To The Forest

I have listened to the forest since I was young enough to remember. I have never heard all it's voice, but I have heard a lot of it in the last 62 years. My father listened before me, and showed me his places to listen and learn and see. I have found so many of my own since then, but I have never had a son with an ear for the voice of the forest. They listened to other songs, to other drumbeats.

I have heard the wind in the trees, I have heard and seen the leaves falling, season after season. It has been the dry rustle and susurration of leaves sliding through the chill Piedmont air and down a hickory and beech and oak hillside to the waiting trickle of a creek or a beaver pond or a river, or drifting on the edge of a man-made lake. I have seen the silent fall of yellow and brown in a river swamp on a cool, breezeless Autumn day, when all the world was elsewhere outside the envelope of silence, and the trees were a cathedral of sky-reaching buttressed and fluted trunks disappearing into the blue vault of heaven.

I have tried to hear from the macro to the micro, the alpha and omega of eternal shifting knife-edged balance. I see a God of care as he keeps all in harmony, the music of the spheres in eternal point-counterpoint. A tree grows and dies or is cut, another fills the void, the animals find browse and shelter and prey in the openings and new growth, the organisms live and flourish in the decay as God eternally moves the balance point to account for that which is new and that which is old. He taps his baton and begins an ever-new symphony. And I listen.

I have watched through cycles and cycles of death and life, of hunter and hunted, of harvested and grown, of stewards and rapists, of land-hungry and land-poor. I have heard the forest in storm and rain and snow and unbearable summer heat, when the sun was blue and blind overhead, and I, like Samson, was "eyeless in Gaza, grinding corn, blind, blind in the noonday sun" (my favorite quote from Ezra Pound). I have "seen the bear," which, as every woodsman knows, is oncoming heat stroke. I have seen it several miles back in the super-heated shadeless piney Flatwoods, surrounded by heavy undergrowth of gallberry, palmetto and sawbriar. It took every bit of skill, endurance and determination to survive I had in order to get out alive.

I have watched countless logging operations, a few of which have ruined or changed forever the face of nature; most of which have healed and begun anew within several seasons. I love the people who wrest a living from the woods, both past and present. Some are as honest as the day is long, and some are and have been the neighborhood crooks all of their lives ("He may be a crook, but he is OUR crook!"). They all have one thing in common—they have paid a price of admission to be there, by what they have given up or never known. Most woods people live poorly or simply.

Most people who own timberland have made countless sacrifices, sometimes on the altar of ignorance and more often on the altar of stewardship. It is the people who view the forest as a commodity to buy and sell who tend to be the rapers and pillagers. Most are as much a part of God's balance as any other, and most share equally in God's bounty. Not most investors or developers, though.

Nor most environmentalists, who would cut mankind and God from the loop of birth and death, who would freeze the balance point, so to speak. They believe man's broad footprint in the forest is sacrilege. I don't. I believe God's marvelous system can accommodate almost anything but concrete, and even that in moderation.

Like James Taylor, I've seen fire and I've seen rain, and I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end. I've seen fire used as a marvelously effective tool, burning in a pencil thin line to control undergrowth and fire hazard, and I have seen it rampaging and out of control, burning the very oxygen of the air. I have seen the wet that relieves drought and brings saving moisture to plants and animals, and I have seen hurricane storms and rains that have devastated thousands of acres, leaving matchsticks of tumbled trees. I have heard the scream of thousands of dying songbirds in those same storms.

Listening to the forest is more than a pleasant walk in the woods of a Saturday morning. I have listened and paid in years and health to hear what I have heard, and I have not begun to hear all there is to hear. So listen if you want, but pay the price. Pay the price.
 

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