Verified by 
In the last post, I discussed 10 signs of love for people or place. I felt those signs recently towards a neighbor in the natural world as described in the free verse below.
The oak genus has over 450 species. In our yard and in nearby yards, pin oaks dominate. I look out my home office window and admire the soaring trunks and branches above me. Not too long ago, I was shocked into a different awareness.
The torture started with the unnatural buzz of machines. I did not understand but then saw the machines in the air, attacking my neighbors with detached, cold precision.
First the fingers go. The flutter of leaves pulled to the earth. Then an arm is cut off. Thud, my house shakes. Thud. More arms. Thud. Thud. There goes a squirrel’s nest. Birds’ nests. Gone. As the body is cut into pieces, it feels like sword cuts, knife plunges. Killing my neighbors, the insects, bacteria and fungus that lived on or in the tree. Carted off like they are of no import. Death prescribed. Slave owners killing their slaves.
There was no ceremony. No farewells. No honoring of gifts given over many decades. Just life taken. Presumably for convenience—no leaf falling on precious sod grass. No messing up of carpet monoculture.
Death in exchange for order.
Sorry! Sorry! I say over and over to the lives being extinguished. Forgive them for they know not what they do. More to the point, they do not feel what they do. They do not feel a sense of relation to the trees. No sense of respect, honor, mystery, oneness.
No, treated like dead objects to begin with, the trees are nothing. Those who think they are owners don’t hear-- the crying, the wails, the laments as lives are cut short, as their purpose to support a biodiverse community is thwarted. Who decides the value of a life? Who decides to murder? Who decides that another life is purposeless? Why is the life of another considered inconvenient? Instead of killing, move yourself away.
Taking out community members should be criminal. Tree murder is eco-terrorism.
Aldo Leopold, in the July entry for the Sand County Almanac (about Wisconsin), described how the plant, cutleaf Silphium (which grows up to 3 feet), reacted to being mowed--it would reattempt to grow once or twice and then give up and disappear. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, describes an experiment with the sweet grass plant. One plot was treated as if the plants were objects, without concern for relationship; a second plot was left alone (as Westerners typically think must happen for natural entities to thrive); a third plot was treated as native peoples would treat it--as purposeful agents: plants were asked for permission to pull them. The first plot struggled, the second disappeared and the third one thrived. The third plot was honored and loved.
The 10 signs of love (according to KD Moore) include to want: to be near it, to know everything about it, to rejoice in its existence, to fear its loss, to protect it, to be transformed in its presence, to be joined with it, to want the best for it, desperately, and to accept moral responsibility for it.
Perhaps my love was not so desperate (number 9) because I did not run out and put myself between tree and machine, like a mother would do for her child.
I see four ways to analyze this: One, I was in shock and did not know at first what was happening, a common reaction of bystanders to vicimization. Death was already in place before I realized what was gong on.
Two, the brakes on taking action come from the realization of the modern world’s complications to be overcome for any chance of success: notions of property ownership and its prerogatives, assumptions about nonhuman inferiority, depersonalized systems that operate outside of feeling. I knew it would not work. Lack of community support and fear for self-safety also come into play. Movements from the USA civil rights movement to Tianneman Square require community solidarity to tone down self-protective concerns.
Three, I may have had a Taoist attitude of ‘letting things be,’ the optimistic notion that all Is and will Be. Each entitiy has its own path. There is a time for everything. Death is just a shift in perspective and fodder for new life.
Four, maybe I am desensitized to the abuse toward natural world entities because it is so commonplace. A sad state of affairs.
One other thought. Regarding number 7 from this list—the desire to fill yourself with the presence of the Loved One: Sometimes among humans this desire is obscured by a history of abuse/neglect/ misunderstanding, as happens these days too often in child-parent relationships. In that case, emotional roadblocks must be dismantled before one is able to reach the state of blissful appreciation of presence with the other.
The assumption too is that the other person is open to being present with oneself. That is, even if I have eliminated any hard-heartedness towards a specific other, that person may still be defensive towards me. People (in civilized societies anyway) typically learn to be socially self-protective in an unreliable, unsupportive social world.
In contrast, the natural world does not put up barriers like people do. So it may be easier to see the 10 characteristics more commonly with natural-world loves and less commonly with human loves. Then, did I truly love my neighbor?
