Tuesday 26 February 2013

Roots


I hope I get crushed to death by a falling tree.

I like the thought of being in tune with nature. And what better way to commune with Mother Nature than having the paste of you battered into the soil? Your brains will feed the wild mushrooms, your blood will quench the parched forest floor, little bits of what was once your wallet will prompt seedlings to grow, proud and strong, inching towards the sun.

It doesn't even make sense to talk about us and the earth and the mushrooms and the sun as separate things. We are all one big cloud of stuff, churning and bubbling. We spend most of our lives pretending that this isn't true. We build concrete offices and metal cars and denim overalls to partition the unpartitionable. It's as futile as placing a wine rack in the sea.

That's why I yearn for the careless lumberjack. I'll cover myself in greenery, camouflaged against the bush, and wait for the chainsaw (or, preferably, the noble axe) to eat into the trunk of the barkéd beast. Judging its descent trajectory using my brain, which was itself a tree-like thing, some way back down the evolutionary road, I will hurl my sturdy frame under the plummeting wood.

For a moment, the lumberjack will be scared. He'll instinctively shout "look out!" (if he's as Canadian as I assume he is), but there will be no time. In two seconds flat, my skeleton will have become a memory. It will be death and burial at a single stroke.

The lumberjack will soon realise that no tragedy has taken place. This is just a communion between atoms. We do not mourn the flour kneaded into the dough. We realise that the flour is a part of the dough, and that the resultant bun depends upon the flour, the milk, the yeast(?), the rolling pin. Weep not for the ingredients, for they have always been bun, and forever shall be bun.

At the lumberjack's inquest, held in a shack of corrugated iron, a company official will check that the proper safety procedures were followed. They will have been followed. The proper safety procedures don't allow for a camouflaged man, emboldened by an unusually close relationship to Gaea.

The lumberjack will be cleared of any wrongdoing, as of course he should be. He should not be punished, he should be praised. He is the catalyst for holy reabsorption.

A small stone will mark the spot of my departure, though departure it is not. It is an arrival. I will return into open arms.

And in thousands of years, I will have become the soil, I will have become the tree, I will have become the stone. I will mark the future departure/arrival of another brave soul, who has stood under the shadow a falling trunk and known what it means to be part of the universe.

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