Aletheia

The Greek word for "truth" which literally means "un-forgetting" - allowing something to return from oblivion.

Iain McG reminded me of the word, which I had only known as meaning truth. He contrasts an idea of truth-as-correctness with truth-as-unconcealing. The former considers truth to be something determinate and external; the latter as something revealing itself to us only through our experience. Our worth truth is related to trust and originally carried the sense of a pledge - I plight my troth. In old texts, a knight good and true was faithful, reliable, committed. Etymology is itself revealing. How we used to think. About promises, fidelity and commitment rather than about something "out there" as a decontextualised fact.

Un-forgetting. I like that. The unforgotten ways. The unforgotten love. The unforgotten earth.

An oak tree on the road where I often park to run and visit the poplar copse has died this year. It came into bud, but never flushed out. It could have died over the winter, as the buds form in autumn. Perhaps compression and flooding were too much for it. But every tiny twig has buds. The tree died suddenly.

I unforgot this tree on the bat walk. One of the volunteers is an arborist - he climbs trees and when up in the canopy he can feel how healthy or unhealthy they are.... sensing in his body any difference in the movement of the limbs. Anyway, he mentioned this tree, as he was saying that the Major Oak (in Sherwood Forest) is predicted to die this year. Compaction caused by all the visitors as well as the flooding and droughts. He said, "The rowan may be the last native tree left standing. Maybe the field maple. So many of them just seem to be giving up." We ran through the species. A few, those two, plus hornbeam, seem OK but, he said, no one is planting them.

This made me think. These days, letting trees regenerate naturally seems the best way, but the trees who are common enough to regenerate (oak and ash and beech and willow - to be fair, I don't see the willows dying out any time soon) have these seemingly fatal weaknesses, as do even the naturalised aliens (I do hate the term) like sycamore, sweet chestnut and horse chestnut. Limes (lindens) are planted, but not so much the native small-leaved lime and limes seem to have a new problem.

Of course any kind of monoculture is ripe for pest destruction, but the considered planting in regenerating woodland of hornbeam, rowan, field maple, and small-leaved lime might be a good idea.

Time to unforget those trees, whitebeam too, who have slipped out of consciousness.