SSW@beBee

Sensational Start to the Week at beBee: SSW@beBee

I have a hive called, “What words mean to me.”

I have now added the following feature to this hive; every Monday, I am posting writings related to the word “senses”. This week I offer a discussion based on excerpts from David George Haskell's preface to his book, The Songs of Trees.

"For the Homeric Greeks, kleos, fame, was made of song. Vibrations in air contained the measure and memory of a person’s life. To listen was therefore to learn what endures.
I turned my ear to trees, seeking ecological kleos. I found no heroes, no individuals around whom history pivots. Instead, living memories of trees, manifest in their songs, tell of life’s community, a net of relations. We humans belong within this conversation, as blood kin and incarnate members. To listen is therefore to hear our voices and those of our family.
Each chapter of this book attends to the song of a particular tree: the physicality of sound, the stories that brought sound into being, and our own bodily, emotional, and intellectual responses. Much of this song dwells under the acoustic surface. To listen is therefore to touch the stethoscope to the skin of a landscape, to hear what stirs below."

"Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment”, separate and apart from humans. We are apart of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others”, so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things”. Our bodies and our minds, our “Science and Art”, are as natural and wild as they ever were.
We cannot step outside of life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature.
Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty."

Image credit: Pesticide Action Network

My Call To Action is my invitation. I invite you to send me a description of what makes sense to you.