The Christmas Tree

Before time was captured and wrought to enmesh humans, when time itself was neither named nor measured, in the dark warm soil of the rainforest on a ridge beside a long dead volcano, a life is formed.

In an endless, wet forest that has no tracks, no distinctions, no gods, and no regrets, a point, a second perhaps, is marked in the slow time of the forest, and that itself becomes the beginning.

It winds and weaves towards an ending that happens when time is scarce but not precious, wasted but never valued, dissected to ever smaller fractions but never whole.

Hundreds of seasons pass and this longest day has just waned. The now tall and proud tree senses it. The rainforest is in full flower and blooming green. This tree absorbs chaos, becomes an extension of the earth, a pinnacle of its kind, the keystone of the forest. The worth of each season is recorded faithfully in the rings deep inside this flourishing bloodwood, as in some undiscovered wondrous memory device that will never fail.

I've passed this tree many times on my solitary walks, patted it, hugged, stroked to feel the stories on its skin, arched and stretched my neck to see the top. It’s a strong and silent friend, and I can tell it is weary and ready to leave this place. The spirit has already gone and the wood is shocked through to death by lightning.

Each time I touch this venerable master a sadness flows into me as I feel the lifelessness of the timber. This protector of the forest has been worn down by the incursions of humans. It has nothing left to give the forest. Strange that the once brown trunk has turned silver-grey, set apart from the green intensity of the remaining bush. In the slough of an afternoon storm sunlight slants under low dark clouds and the tree is grieving for colour.

These last hundred seasons have been hard. More men on horses and carts, cutting bush, felling trees all around, making roads. Tumbrels showered in chips and splinters and leaves drag past.. There were still long silences and restful dark, and it longs for the peace and serenity when men with soft voices walked barefoot carrying spears, and women harvested grain from the grasses and dug for roots. When the creek nearby flowed clear and strong and fish swam free, and platypuses hid where the overhang at the edge of the creek shrouded the short antre. Now it is always brown and clogged with debris.

This invasion of the forest by noise and destruction it can absorb for many seasons. Branches continue to reach outwards in shelter and protection, a mystical umbrella chanting songs of the stars. Its promise to the forest is fulfilled, and it can rest.

Then came the harsh buzzing of engines that never ceased, never rested. Cars, more rushing from houses that had erupted close by. Noise louder than the crashing of hail. More light than the longest of thunderstorms, light that never sleeps. In the dark, feral alien creatures lurk amongst the grasses or crawl and clamber high into dimly shining branches, creaking and silence, creaking and silence, riding the soft wind. The tree is frail, but the intensity and turmoil surrounding it creep up through its far flung roots. And through those interconnected nerves it knows the forest is moving away, dying.

If you can read the narrative on the skin of the tree you can tell of the drifting dense fogs and showering mist on the escarpment, of the smell of salt that came on fierce winds from across the valley, of fires that raced by, searing branches and leaving tales of danger and excitement written on its trunk. Serene and alone, 80 metres tall, 3 metres around, scarred at the base where a shelter was cut from the bark many lives ago, it basks in the soft flow of time.

It has forged strong blood coloured wood that, unharmed, will last centuries. It endured through its eternal calm, its steadfast steadiness, its sense of strength and purpose, its support and connections with all living things in the rainforest. But men with shorter purpose and narrower sight have crowded in, displacing the rainforest, and it senses, through the tension and taste of the earth, that a reckoning will come.

Storms fight around it, rivers of rain flood the forest, and sharp tearing lightning strikes, shocking the thick trunk through to the earth, boiling the sap and wrenching the heart from the tree.

In the loneliness of its last decades it died, maybe of weariness or age, but stands strong yet decaying, silver-grey amongst the dense green of the remnant rainforest behind it. Branches fall to be carted and burned for warmth and cooking. But no-one ever fells it nor reaches its top, gazing above all across the valley. Kangaroo grass and blue grass around it are reduced to stubble by brutish cutting, dragging the trunk to the verge of the road. It is eternal in its patience, steady and thick, and this night it waits in the dark for the boy.

There is no distinct mark in the seasons to record the emergence of the boy. Hundreds of humans are born each minute and the marks of their arrival are rushed and blurred. The boy has survived birth and school and is struggling towards manhood.

He is not yet fully formed, a tiny shoot on the vast complexity of the earth. Yet he feels himself whole, large, and his dreams are hot and confusing. Daring and risk are his motifs, causality remains a surprise. He strives and fails often, but strives again. He is potential and promise bundled as offering to gods he would never acknowledge. He has promises yet to make and not keep. He is, always, searching for tomorrow, and it is, always, out of reach.

He knows deep within him he should arrange his time and space differently to be with his mother more often. But there is competition and conflict in everything he does or needs to do. He is confused by the increasing pace and complexity of life, by the need for love and trust that is so hard to find, except with his mother.

Within this always anxious rush he begins crafting a message to explain this lost and displaced time. These hours, now collapsed to minutes and seconds, which should have, as he wanted, been devoted to her, to mending her heart.

His car, insensitive to time and place, meanders and kisses the tree full on the hard grey trunk.

The tree shudders, shards fly from the edges of the bark scar. The top third of the trunk breaks free and drops from 30 metres onto the car. Silence. It is over. For the tree and the boy. Time marks an absence on its infinite helix.

Ben’s presents unopened, the roast to prepare, Shirley scans his socials. Someone has posted a link. The police report says: An 18 year old male died after his car hit a tree at approximately 2.30am on 25 December.

By early morning, as I walk, there are bunches of hand-picked flowers withering under the remnants of the tree.

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Thank you for reading, Stories come and go, some good, some wanting. Imagination is an elusive butterfly that flits and is gone.

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