On solstice eve, a gale came thrashing trees, strewing sticks. Around each tree in the park, particularly the limes and ash, was a leeward shadow of branches and twigs, mostly dead brash winnowed from the living boughs, cast down to rot into the earth.
Before decaying and recycling nutrients back to the tree roots through fungi, the fallen sticks had a more esoteric presence. They fell individually but made patterns or shapes together – shapes like the Chinese characters or the symbolism of Nordic runes used in spells, or Mimih spirit sticks in the ceremonies of the Kunwinjku people of Australia, or the stick divination of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso.
These stick pictograms belonged to alphabets of shamanism and magic. Despite stealing ideas from other cultures, surely these things are random arrangements of wind-blown material from trees that don’t have to be symbols of anything to matter. Whatever their ecological or cultural significance, these bits of arboreal litter are not exclusively existing through what they are made of or what they do. They are things with enough weirdness to be themselves.
Individually and collectively they withdraw into Saproxylica, the realm of dead wood. This is the teeming, vivid reality that is the beginning and end of woods and forests: an ecology of fungi, animals, plants and microbes that create and destroy trees, a timber economy based on death and rot. The power of the gale shook starlings out of the lime tree and caused all kinds of damage, but its relationship to trees is also aesthetic – a violent, terrifying beauty that releases such mysterious energy as it rips through tree branches, bends and fractures trunks, pulling at the roots as if to wrench them from the soil and hurl them into the sky.
When the wind flies away or dies, its history is written in the poetry of sticks. They sing about tipping over the balancing point of the shortest day of the year, of the undreamed-of consequences of actions that will shape the future, of Saproxylica and the mysterious beauty of rot.
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