"I suppose I love this life, in spite of my clenched fist. I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree, and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers, and I wonder if Beethoven held his breath the first time his fingers touched the keys the same way a soldier holds his breath the first time his finger clicks the trigger. We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe." Andrea Gibson
ASPENS AND APATHY
I love the sound of wind moving through aspens more than I love the sound of wind moving through anything else.
It is specific.
Not quite rustling.
Not quite whispering.
Not quite a wind chime.
Something closer to music—the music that existed before we named it.
Thousands of silver-green leaves
turning themselves over at once,
making a sound I have always believed
is ancestral.
Magical.
So much so I remember my first encounter with it.
Like it was something holy.
Something to behold.
I was in my mid-thirties then,
deep in the heart of Colorado,
in a summer when depression had made it difficult for much of anything to reach me for at least a year.
But somehow, the aspens did.
Their song reached a place in me I thought the world had lost access to.
I didn’t know then that years later I would be afraid of losing access to that place again.
Maybe that is the problem.
The older I get,
the more I know.
And the more I know,
the harder it becomes to simply stand beneath a tree and hear the wind rushing through its leaves and feel that innocence, that enchantment.
Like how a few years after I met the aspens, overcame that depression, became a little bit older?
I read that trees talk.
And I have always talked to trees out loud.
Maybe some part of me believed they were listening long before I knew they were listening.
Before I knew they were speaking.
That beneath the dirt is an entire conversation we cannot hear:
roots and fungi,
warnings and nutrients,
one tree sending what it has to another tree that needs it more.
And aspens, God, the aspens—
sometimes an entire forest
is one living thing.
Above ground,
a thousand separate bodies.
Below, one body refusing the illusion of separateness.
I didn’t know that the first time I loved them.
That summer, deep in my depression,
I knew only what my senses could tell me:
their white bark,
their golden hour leaves,
their sound,
their simplicity.
And somehow,
when so little else could reach me,
that was enough.
Do I love them more now?
Or did knowing more about them take something from me?
Was it better when I could stand beneath them and hear only music?
Before I knew the forest was talking?
Before everything beautiful came with marginalia and footnotes?
I think about this with people, too.
With the world.
The more I read, the more I know,
the more difficult ignorance and naivety become.
There are things
I wish I did not know.
Systems hidden beneath systems.
Suffering made invisible only because looking directly at it would make comfort impossible.
And sometimes I understand the temptation to stop looking.
There is only so much a person can know before knowing begins to feel heavy.
Only so many injustices you can learn the names of.
Only so many times you can discover the world is cruel in precisely the way someone warned you it was.
Eventually, my rage gets tired.
Wanes.
And somewhere near tired?
My apathy lives.
I can feel it sometimes,
that seductive little shrug.
The voice that says:
Nothing changes.
You cannot save everyone.
Put the book down.
Stop reading.
Go outside.
Be happy.
And God, sometimes I want to.
Sometimes I want the mercy of ignorance.
To know less.
To understand less.
To be both happy and care too much.
Is that possible?
To stand beneath the aspens and hear nothing but leaves?
But then the wind comes,
and every leaf begins trembling,
thousands of them,
and I know what is beneath me.
I know that what appears separate
is,
and always has been,
connected.
Maybe knowing this is precisely why ignorance becomes impossible.
And somehow, my knowing does not ruin their music.
It makes me listen harder.
And there it is again...
the line I keep trying to walk: knowing enough to keep raging
but not knowing so much that I stop raging at all.
Protecting my peace without protecting it so fiercely that someone else’s suffering
becomes the price of it.
Comfort without apathy.
I don’t want to stop caring because caring hurts.
I don’t want to mistake numbness for wisdom.
Or exhaustion for enlightenment.
I don’t want to know so much about the world that I finally decide there is no point in loving it.
Maybe intelligence isn’t knowing everything.
Maybe wisdom is knowing enough to understand how terrible things can be
and choosing to remain
tender, gentle anyway.
Maybe the answer isn’t rage or apathy.
Maybe it's the trees.
To know the forest is wounded and still sends sugar through the roots.
To know winter is coming and still the leaves turn gold.
To know the wind will shake you and still make music.
So I will keep reading.
I will keep learning.
I will keep letting the world break my heart
in places where it should be broken
so I don’t become, never will become, someone I am not.
And when knowing becomes too heavy,
I will go find the aspens.
I will stand beneath them.
I will listen to a thousand leaves singing above me
and remember
the thousand conversations happening below.
And I will not ask which version of me
loved them more:
the woman
who didn’t know
or the woman
who does.
Because perhaps the miracle is
that after everything I have learned,
after everything I cannot unknow,
after everything I have learned to name,
I can still stand beneath the trees,
hear the wind
move through them,
and love this impossible world enough
to refuse
to stop caring.
