Like a thousands-year old tree before it clear-fells in the forest, she is rising out of the earth to meet a sky, to show her face to the sun. Her hopes and desires are timeless. She only wants what hearts thousands of years ago also wanted.
But – a lumberjack, burly and bearded, swinging an axe, the heft of it comfortable and fully real in his hand, he approaches the majestic ringed oak and with a roar that scatters all the birds in the forest to all the corners of the heavens, he heaves the blade into solid trunk. He feels the reverberations in the handle of his tool, it travels up his arm, it finds the top of his head.
He repeats his labors. And in time, the tree succumbs, it is brought to its knees. (Does anyone hear its cries? The calving? If there is nobody in the forest when it finally acquiesces its fate…that old question…)
And so it is with her. If her story isn’t named, it still is. (The lumberjack for her is reality, or it is details, her lumberjack is time and space.) Her experience still exists in the verdant and loamy forest. There isn’t the need of spectators, of observers, it is a quiet time. It has no fury or direction. Her time carries itself in the natural world, outside of society, inside the beats and special tempo that nature commands.
Alive, her blood moves quicker, here in the woods where sun streams its lovely incessant amber heat down through all the green. She is sumptiously warm, here.
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mary june brown 