We walk on a road that is down below our land. The road is lined with deciduous trees growing out of the rich soil, and our land is clay and rock dotted with steadfast red cedar or, more poetically, juniper trees.
There is a feeling of being carried aloft when you crane your neck and stare straight up over your head at the lean maples. Not sure how there can be a feeling, as such, or what brings it about, if I didn’t learn it from somewhere.
In a few days the leaves will be pulled from their branches as we endure wind, rain, and storms to usher in change and eventually winter. We’ll still venture down, through the snowy lanes and forest to this road, in the dead of winter, freezing fingers, grey clouds of breath, to hear the crack and crackle of these same branches overhead, as they clatter from wind driven winter forces.
And on our own piece of land, when I find time for stillness, I watch as the junipers seem to lean in to listen or watch me. Not that I am the centre of their universe, no, but we seem in some strange way to be holding a kind of curved communion. What do they hear? What do they see? Do they get me as I chase Hugo in circles around their base?
I ask, who listened like this? Who reached for the sky like this.
Andrew Binks 