What you do with your dying

In the afternoon, before the visit to Oxford, I attended a Zoom meeting with the other members of the Finland cohort. Some incredible artists, Marjo, Satu and Milja; a remarkable performance artist, who describes herself as a "Brutal Finn"; women with fascinating projects, like this one; a Druid and a poet. And yours truly. Who writes about talking to trees.

It sounds as if getting to the residentials will be epic. It may be just as well that I can only make three of the four. But I am very excited.

A few days later, I went out on a walk. It was meant to involve birds but was very windy and besides I was distracted by trees. Especially one old oak who'd lost a huge branch, I think maybe the main stem.

I gave the slideshow that title as I was thinking about the conversation I had with a tree at Burnham Beeches. This thought inhabits my mind. It is not just the individual death, but the ending of things - the sixth mass extinction, the end of the stable temperature era, perhaps (we can hope) the end of a destructive era, an exploitative mindset, a broken species.

There is such beauty in the world.

My understanding from this tree was that humans have the gift to tell stories about how and why the world is. The stories should weave the world together, but we have gone off the rails - telling stories that break apart and drive apart, atomise, sever, individualise... all those stories. We need the stories that heal and the tales that entangle.