Heidi Seaborn

The poem is written in the ancient Japanese form, Zuihitsu, which translates into “follow the paintbrush” and in this instance, it is following the paintbrush of my mind which began with the title—“Dendrochronology.” Dendrochronology, the marking of time, especially major events and history through the rings of a tree trunk feels both scientific and spiritual to me. We are learning so much about the life of trees. How they communicate with one another, signaling needs and danger. How one will sacrifice for the other. A quiet symbiosis taking place in forests and jungles. It makes me think of how children have a life separate from their parents and twins often have a language all their own. But now I’ve stepped into my own trap—the desire to personify everything.

So, when my friend wondered aloud, as we were walking in a park of old growth trees near the Snoqualmie River outside of Seattle, how a tree perceives time, I couldn’t help but humanize that idea. To think of what those old trees have lived through in terms of human milestones—the wars fought, the miracles of invention, the quotidian lives of my friend and me.

Linking these old trees to me with the connective tissue of metaphor even as I fight against that idea in my very next thought. Fight against the practice of naming the massive Sequoias. Trees that lived through a millennium of wars named after Generals. Worse, named after the very statues of Civil War generals that are finally being scrubbed off this land.

And so, I’m wrestling with the form of claiming that we do as humans. And how even the small claims that we stake out—to name a tree or, as I did in my childhood, to build a tree fort—tame the natural world. So, while it’s easy to be incensed or rather really pissed off when someone sparks an accidental wildfire during a gender reveal party or by tossing a cigarette out the car window, aren’t those acts just a more deliberate, uglier form of human dominance over nature?