Tree Sitters

The Berkeley campus tree sit ended a month or so ago. The long, nonviolent direct action of dozens of individuals ended in a day and was quickly consumed by other news like bank bailouts and the presidential election. I haven't been back to see if anything is left of the grove, but I understand the trees started coming down quickly before anyone could go back up them. 

If those trees carried impressions of human history they would have recorded thoughts about WW1 and WW2 and the great depression. They would have known about the elections of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I envy a little the people who spent some of their lives up in those trees. Whether the trees carried impressions of us, I'm sure those individuals now carry powerful impressions of those trees. The tree sitters, beyond knowing the human cold of sitting 60 feet up on a high Berkeley hillside in the cold of a winter rain, must know something of the tree feel of being, of swaying in the breeze. They have a better human sense of the smell of wet bark and the quiet made by distance. They have viewed Berkeley from a now extinct perch. They must have a profound understanding of how we humans busy ourselves and how needless and harmful this bizzieness sometimes is.

I respect the people who took the time to be and reflect in those trees. They were serving all of us, bringing a consciousness to the lives of those trees, bringing consciousness to life. How often does that make the news?