RESTING
I talk to trees. Please understand, I’m an immigrant; I came to the US all by myself. If I don’t talk to trees, I risk of oversharing and alienating neighbors. So here is me letting you in on some of my tree talk.
“I am so tired, Black Walnut,” my back rests on ki’s* trunk, my eyes trace one of ki’s thigh-thick roots that snake through the grass.
The black walnut smiles. “It’s in part because you humans despise the gift of winter — a season of non-doing: not producing, not consuming, just resting. Believing you only have value when you produce, you don’t allow for seasons of barrenness and fallow.”
“Yes, wise tree,” I say. “But what might you say to me in this moment?”
The tree says nothing, just holds me as I sink my back deeper into ki’s bark.
When I get up, I skip the meeting I am supposed to attend. I attend instead to my own sore body.
*A note on the word ki
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “English grammar demands that I refer to my esteemed healer as it, not as a respected teacher, as all plants are understood to be in Potawatomi. That has always made me uncomfortable. I want a word for beingness. Can we unlearn the language of objectification and throw off colonized thought? Can we make a new world with new words?” In this essay, Robin offers an alternative word for it — “ki” and “kin” for the plural.
As I wrote these pieces I’ve been having a hard time jumping from it, to he or she or they as I feel the beingness of the trees. “Ki” offers a lovely alternative and I am trying it on.
