Nature Always Vanishes at Night

I’ve avoided writing about this for at least half a year now, mostly because the subject matter was so emotionally charged that I couldn’t find the guts to open it up. Writing about this back then would have been like rubbing salt on an open wound: there are certain topics where writing helps you put an event firmly behind you, and there are others where writing makes things even worse: it re-traumatizes you, as well as your readers.

Given that the main emotion involved was raw anger, this would have made for really, really, boring prose anyway. Because anger blinds you. It doesn’t let you be loose, inquisitive, analytical, didactic. Even your laptop begins to secretly hate you for becoming a drama queen, unloading eloquent navel-gazing bile and self-pity in your ranty essay. I don’t want to do that, not even as a joke. So now, many months later, I’m calmer and wiser and I can finally approach the subject matter with calm curiosity:

Last year, this fucking c**t who calls herself my neighbour invaded my garden on the day we were away and cut down three beautiful trees.

OK. So that didn’t go well. Big writing fail here, see what happens when anger takes over? Let’s start over and rephrase that with calmness, openness, and mindfulness:

Last year, I came down to the garden on a beautiful morning to discover that three of my favourite trees had been pruned brutally and unprofessionally, without my permission. The reason? The trees were “littering” the neighbour’s property with their leaves.

You probably think that this is an essay about ecological grief. But funnily, I had gotten over my garden grief over the maimed trees in less than five minutes, a useful skill I learned from my father. Besides, the grief was overshadowed by a much more intense feeling: what I still haven’t gotten over, and never will, is my sadness for my neighbour. Because I can only feel incredibly sad for someone who hates a tree for doing what trees naturally do: they shed their leaves in the autumn.

The incident reinforced my hopelessness for humanity as a whole. Because if there are so many people out there who are willing to cut down trees simply for shedding their leaves, there is zero chance of this species avoiding the evolutionary garbage bin, where it truly belongs. The whole incident is so retarded if you think about it, it reminds me of that story of Persian king Xerxes, whose ship was about to sink in a storm just as he was on the cusp of invading Greece. He ordered his men to take their whips out and lash at the waves, to punish the sea for being so rough. Now, I don’t know about you, but that is some A-class Darwinian natural selection at work, right there.

I know that all my readers are nature defenders, this is how most of you became my readers in the first place. So, I have a message for all of you: please protect your emotional world, because you are surrounded by people who will never understand anything. Because if someone thinks that a tree should be cut down because the cool autumn breeze carries its beautiful foliage into their yard, is it really worth confronting that person? What would you actually say to them? They don’t just lack an ecological awareness. They lack consciousness altogether, and you can’t teach consciousness to a zombie. Apart from having a pulse, a human who is nature blind is no different than the walking dead. Leave them in their grave, to do the only thing they have known how to do all their lives: be unconscious.

So, I never actually confronted them. They would deny that they did it anyway. It was a job done under the cover of night I’m sure, as none of the other neighbours even noticed them come or go. Most nature crimes happen at night, and not just because the perpetrators are avoiding arrest: the darkness prevents them from witnessing their own crime. It protects them from seeing the beauty they are destroying, just in case, hell forbid, they suddenly felt whole, awake, conscious. They are terrified of beauty, of their own aliveness, and that is why they are terrified of un-blinding themselves. I can’t help but feel sad for them, but at the same time, I won’t feel sad when these humans go extinct. The toilet flush of evolution is full to the brim and has been waiting for quite some time now to unload.

The irony is, none of the three trees were truly deciduous, only shedding the occasional leaf here and there: a beautiful huge white oleander, a Japanese pittosporum, and an Australian bottle-brush tree.

Thanks for listening to my rant. Love, G.

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