It is Monday. A Monday in which I need a reminder that things are real. I sit next to a dead wooden table. Dead, yes. It is not dead because the tree is dead. It is dead because it has lost its meaning. Hegel says that love involves not being dead for the other. Hegel says that we cannot love property. That property deadens the object. I see the table. I examine it. Yes, it is dead. I cannot see the faces of the ones that made it. Claims of Ikea's poor working conditions enter my head. If I try hard enough I can see a factory. If I try to see a forest I feel tricked. I am so thirsty for aliveness. I drink water from the tap. I am so far away from any rivers. Mentally. Mentally, I try to recall that not all humans kill. I have heard tales. Tales of tribes where nothing truly dies. Tales of tribes where trees are not trite. An alive table is possible on their land. Are we doomed for death everywhere else? There is an alive tree outside my window. There is a patch of land. Yet I cannot help but notice its controlled artificiality. I need to go somewhere else. Wider. Freer. I stare at my computer. I need to stop imagining places in my head.
I take two buses and an S-Bahn to get to the Tegel forest. I have decided to see the oldest tree in Berlin. It takes me around one and a half hours to get there. I get irrationally anxious about the time that I am wasting. What is waste anyways? Is waste a waste if it returns to the ground? Is rest resting anything? I see the flowers that have been long asleep. I see them waiting for the warmer days. There is no rush. They are hunched. They will be standing tall in the next months. They will be ever thirsty in the summer. They will dry the first days of autumn. And then, again and again and again. I see circles. I see the entrance to the forest. There is barely a soul. There are some cars, not a single person walking with me. It must be because it is Monday. The trees do not know that it is Monday. I even forget that it is Monday. Time feels slippery. I get flashbacks to the last time I was in a place like this. It was late fall. Now, it feels like late fall too. It is a few Celsius warmer though. There is also hope that was absent then. Now, somewhere invisible the plants have stored enough water. I do not see it. I see the sun. I see its light painting everything different colors. I squint my eyes and the field far away from me looks red and orange. I squeeze them even more and see all the fallen leaves and rocks transforming into beach pebbles. There is difference and repetition everywhere. I stop squinting and see what is in front of me. There are hundreds of mosses growing everywhere. They look like fuzzy carpets. They look feathery. In spots where the sun hits, they transform into a mine of emeralds. I read a book about mosses a month ago. Bears use moss during winter to plug their system so they do not go to the toilet. I wish I could see a bear somewhere around here. Germany hasn't had bears since the eighteen hundreds. All there is now is five hundred giant plastic bears waiting for tourists in Berlin. I often think they are cute. Now, I wonder why we use animals as signifiers when there is no signified.
The rest of the facts about mosses are somewhere in my brain, but feelings stayed. I feel in awe. I feel indebtedness. In the bareness of winter, mosses give me the hope to move forward. I cannot function in a world without green. Mosses give me the tiny dose of green I starve for. They are hidden springs, sprouting water to me when I am dying of thirst. Now, seeing them in a forest, I realize how much of a forest they are themselves. Tiny spots of forests within a forest. I feel dizzy for a second. The good kind. I wish I was a bug. I wish I could metamorphose and transform back within hours. I wish I could see the macro and the micro. As I get closer to the tree, I think about scale. I think about how my life is a tiny fragment for a tree that is eight hundred years old. I feel irrelevant. I am not. At the same time, I am. I see a lake and imagine its deepness. It is unnerving that I ever feel comfortable swimming in such depth. Yet, I still dream of summer. I see all the people walking near the lake on a bright Monday afternoon. Their faces change now that spring is a few days away. Their faces change now that the sky changes from grey to blue. I remember the tap at home. I remember how I felt so thirsty and yet so ever far away from water. I feel hope in the turquoise. The stream flows slowly. I see motion now. I see how pipes move. I see how water arrives at my faucet.
Right next to the lake, the tree awaits. It couldn't have chosen a more perfect place to grow old. I follow some arrows, and I see it. It does its name justice. It is a fat fat tree. As trees get older they get shorter and fatter. I wanted to see its wrinkles from a closer perspective. A small wooden fence is preventing me from doing so. I admire its texture from afar. I am turning twenty-five this year. I am oft scared I am turning twenty-five. Now, I am not. Now, I wish I would live eight hundred years. I take my notebook, sit on a bench and write. I think how Goethe also sat next to this tree. I wonder if the tree heard some of its stories. I wonder if Goethe listened to the tree's. The stories are recorded on its trunk. Do the wrinkles in my palm also say something about me? There is a plaque for those of us who are not dendrochronologists. We are not all experts in reading trees' stories. I wish I was. I wish I could write circularly. I wonder why it is circular for them. Do they experience time linearly? They are not crabs. They don't walk backward. That much I know. I know that they can regrow. I know they can pause their growth. Is that linear? I forget it is Monday again. I stop and refocus. The birds are calling for my attention. There is a pattern in the sounds. A bird waits for the other one to finish chirping. There is a high-pitched one that never stops tweeting every two minutes. A more delicate one makes silent sounds every three. Then, an owl-like sound. Owls do not hoot in the day. It could be a pigeon. Or a dove. Or a cuckoo. Then, there is silence. I hear the swishing of the wind. I hear meaning.
I sit in front of the tree on a bench made of wood. I have been waiting for it to spew words. A tree is not a book. I have read about them in books. I have read that they hold so many processes inside that trunk. I have read about their subterranean fungal networks. I have tried to remember everything I know about them. Hoping I could see the invisible. I cannot see it using logic. A tree is not a book. They won't say anything to me with words. They are screaming though. They are screaming so loudly. There are thousands of messages being shouted in this forest and I can feel it as the wind passes by. The colors shout. The brown. The green. The yellow. The lines of the trunk blink at me. Loudly. It is only loud if I pay attention. The shapes and twirls of its branches feel like an intensive opera. Dicke Marie looks like an avant-garde sculpture. I am getting dizzy. The good kind. It feels like all the trees are bending towards me. Their bends also carry signs. They can dance before a storm comes. The dizziness stops for a second. My finger touches a splinter. It stings. Only a real bench could do that. I see the tree. I forget about IKEA. The world is not dead.
PD: Lately, I have been posting mostly creative non-fiction, as that is what I've been writing in my free time, but I'll post some criticism/cultural analysis soon enough. In the meantime, go outside and see some trees ♡