Dead Tree; Dead Bird

Outside the window, a tree is framed against a gray, humid sky. The man from the telephone company bends its sapling trunk sideways to make room for the stabilizer legs of his bucket crane truck. The motion makes my teeth ache. The work lights atop the cab flicker like California wildfires—flames licking across untold acres.

Perhaps I’m reminded of those fires because of the heat. Richmond is in the grip of a Virginian heatwave, one oppressive enough that stepping outside for a few minutes makes my chronically ill body feel the toll.

But here, in this land of moisture and summer rain, I’ve grown used to greenery—even in the humid summer heat. Vines and trees, flowers for the bees; the summers here are overgrown to the point of being nearly wild.

Which is perhaps why this tree becomes such a sudden and terrible fixture to my eye.

Because every leaf—on every branch—of this sapling tree is dead. Dead and as dry as if entombed.

I feel something bitter on my tongue.

I’ve been sitting here for an hour, and I come here many times each month to write. Yet I never noticed this dead tree.

Even today: I know I looked right at the tree when I sat at my table, creamy coffee in hand. As the rich-earth of the drink smell steamed around me, I bit into my crisp baguette, and overlooked this crippled life and all the terrors it implies. Is there some secret willful part of us that sees death and simply, automatically, hides?

I am suddenly reminded of the little body in the street from some days before—the little body still and unmoving in the middle of the road: the tiny bird, caught in the middle of the thermal oven of this city's streets; the little creature, dead of heatstroke on a 100+ day.

All around me, so it seems, the world is taking on the shape of fossilized bone—life ossified to stone.

I’ve watched people rage and preach the sanctity of the environment with all the moral superiority of religious zealots. And I understand, empathize, even. But within this moment, I am simply sad. I can’t immediately muster rage. Maybe the air conditioning is responsible for cooling the heat as it rises in my skin.

But, as the sadness settles into me, my mind wanders. We have such potential for beauty in our world—for the sort of life we all long to have. And there comes the anger: all that potential for a good, safe world remains beyond our reach solely because those who believe in hierarchy, and those whose self-interest is anything but enlightened, are allowed to run our fucking world.

So, there it is: it’s actually easy to go from grief to rage. To see one dead tree—one dead bird—and feel hatred at the oligarchs who drive our world toward oblivion. No, I do not pity them whenever they meet their end.

However, to be caught up in such rage is also a trick of the nervous system, for it permits—in its own way—objection to (and removal from) reality.

Rage can create a barrier, it can allow the mind to separate from the here and now—from the hard experiences—and its flame in our bellies makes it easier to avoid actually dealing with the pain.

Easier to hate than to be sad, one might say.

So, I am moved to put down words on the page. I’ll let rage guide my eye but never my soul, and I'll let my soul guide my hand.

Right now? Right now, my soul calls me to immortalize this faded little tree. To place its context into words. To offer a eulogy for all the shade might have been and yet will never be. Maybe it's a metaphor for something.

But maybe words like this matter. Maybe metaphors can move mountains. Maybe someone else will read this and feel the freedom to be brave.

And maybe, just like that, this message will spread, and the world will change.

I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian, life coach, and fiction author. If you like my work and want to support what we do here at Unenlightened Generalists, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month!

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