Mourn The Fallen One
Ancient trees are closest to ‘permanence’ humans know
An old tree dies. Grief arrives. The ancient oak that, according to folklore, sheltered Robin Hood in England’s Sherwood Forest, has fallen. Why should that even be news? Yet it is – not just for conservationists, but for all of us. The news carries a sadness that’s neither a personal hit nor the grief of losing a loved one. It is a quieter sorrow that touches something older – perhaps from connections that predate society itself.
When an old tree dies, it takes so much with it. An ancient tree has witnessed more history than books in a library combined. Every ring in its trunk is history drawing a line: of fires and floods and lightning strikes; perhaps even wars fought in the neighbourhood, of kingdoms risen and fallen. It is enduring shelter, its hollows housed creatures great and small – some, perhaps, extinct today. All that memory. All those stories. Unindexed, unknowable. Yet we know the tree has seen it all. Unmoving, doing nothing more remarkable than remaining alive for centuries.
To mourn their fall is but natural, for they are perhaps the closest things to permanence humans know. To mourn them is recognition that we are but mortal creatures who, for a moment, found something that seemed to reach beyond mortality – only to discover that the Great Oak, too, could fall. We are, in the end, creatures of the forest all.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
