Page 62 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Through my own particular suffering, dreams, and memories, I have come to understand that I

carry the grief of humans’ disconnection from the body—the earth’s and our own—and the

consequences of this disconnection. I carry it in and on my body, its scars the evidence of my

betrayals. When, as a young girl, I wandered out of the woods and out of my body, I entered

into the cultural mind of “I.” This mindset is the real disease. Anorexia, alcoholism, and

necrotizing fasciitis were my symptoms, and, one might say, central characters in my personal

story. I no longer experience the illnesses as “something terrible that happened to me,” but as

allies that were trying desperately to get my attention and signal that something had gone

terribly wrong.

***

Four years ago, I huddled under five layers of covers, the windows draped in quilts to keep out

the cold. Outside, pines and maples, oaks and beeches groaned and cried in the night wind,

their limbs snapping like bones under the weight of snow and ice. Whole trees came down with

a sickening sound that knotted my stomach and brought tears to my eyes. This was no dream; it

was Storm Alfred, which arrived in New England two months after Hurricane Irene, and four

months after the Northeast tornado outbreak. I wept to a friend, “The trees are the front lines.”

Alfred took thirty-nine human lives; more than a thousand trees are estimated to have fallen in

Central Park alone. Twenty-two hundred trees in the New York Botanical Garden’s old-growth

forest were damaged.

The following spring, I hiked through a local game refuge, and wept again at what appeared to

me a battlefield strewn with bodies of trees. The woods on my own property have lost some of

their density due to the storm. During the past two winters, they have thinned even more as the

deer with whom we share the land have, seemingly in desperation, stripped the bottom six feet

or so of the hemlocks for food. This year, for the first time I can remember, the brook on my

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