Wednesday, November 7, 2007

as if a photo was needed

Jeffrey Pippen, "Longleaf Pine Savannah at the Green Swamp, NC - 29 May 2003"

In a longleaf forest, miles of trees forever fade into a brilliant salmon sunset and reappear the next dawn as a battalion marching out of fog. The tip of each needle carries a single drop of silver. The trees are so well spaced that their limbs seldom touch and sunlight streams between and within them.
I'm just over half-way through rereading Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, about her childhood and the astonishing loss of longleaf pine forest in the southeast of the U.S.
This was not a loss I knew as a child. Longleaf was a word I never heard. But it is a loss that as an adult shadows every step I take. I am daily aghast at how much we have taken, since it does not belong to us, and how much as a people we have suffered in consequence.

Not long ago I dreamed of actually cradling a place, as if something so amorphous and vague as a region, existing mostly in imagination and idea, suddenly took form. I held its shrunken relief in my arms, a baby smelted from a plastic topography map, and when I gazed down into its face, as my father had gazed into mine, I saw the pine flatwoods of my homeland.
She is an amazing writer.

2 comments:

Leila said...

Beautiful indeed, thanks. Reminds me of Derrick Jensen, who I am just starting to read. Ecology, the body, rage, poetry. Check him out if you can: A Language Older Than Words.

girl you been blogging!

erin said...

consider him checked out. or at least requested and to be checked out soon.

i'm doing the NaBloPoMo thing with a bit of a twist...to be revealed in a few days.

i'm so glad you came by!