Just Listen

Just Listen

Do trees talk to each other?

Jamie wondered when he was a little kid.

He knew what his dog Bingo said with barks and ears and eyes. He answered, and he also talked with the stray cat named Wilson that he rescued. They understood him and he understood them.

But what about trees, flowers, fish, snakes? Do they all talk to each other, to us if we listen? They are all alive just as we are, and are we really different?

Why do we think we are the only ones who talk or hear each other? Maybe other creatures, even plants might talk to us if we listen.

That’s what Jamie wondered about as a dreamy kid of 6, and now that he was about to graduate from high school, he still wondered about the consciousness of other living things.

He’d seen how trees seem to be connected to each other, how animals behave in certain ways and do communicate to each other.

Now he knew he wasn’t the only one who thought about this. Many scientists and writers of all kinds had asked the same question.

But he wanted to go a step farther, to learn the languages of trees and animals and actually talk with them, gain their perspective on the Earth.

Other kids laughed at him.

“Oh, come on,” LeeAnn said. “Why would you want to talk to an oak or an ant? Don’t be a walnut.”

He laughed at her corny joke.

It was absurd, of course. He knew it was on one level.

But in another way he couldn’t let go of the idea that he wanted to talk to walnut tree or an ant.

He knew it was absurd, but the idea persisted. He was, in fact, deeply in love with nature, with life in all its forms.

Now he was in high school, about to graduate, and his teachers still got peeved while he stared out the window while they talked about geometry or wars or literature or history.

He told them a hundred times. He was listening, just to different teachers. He got all A’s so they couldn't get too upset.

“Ok.Ok,” Mr. Ragar he history teacher said. “Bring in a rose when you teach one to talk.”

He had to laugh.

The teachers shook their heads, but in the coffee room they had to admit the kid had a point and it was beautiful to see that he pursued his ideas with passion.

He laughed at himself. But he couldn’t stop wondering about the connection of all living things. Was that a kind of spiritual notion? Was he really talking about the Great Connection?

Shhh. Don’t say “God.”

He smiled. He didn’t go to church. No one in his family did. But his mom raised a spectacular garden.

He watched the wind set the leaves in the great cottonwoods dancing outside the window while in school Mr. Finley droned on about chemical actions and reactions.

If you watched closely you could see the tree relishing the sun’s warmth. The interaction of the tree with the wind was poetry. He’d seen the same tree hunch over and shiver in the rain. It was a song.

“Dad,” he’d asked when he was about 10 years old, “Do you ever feel like the wheat field is talking to you when you are out there with a shovel, letting water into a field from a ditch?”

“Nope. But I do feel good giving the wheat the water.”

“Well, isn’t that halfway to talking with the wheat?”

“I wouldn't say that, son. But it is a pleasure, you know. You’ve done it. Hey, do the chickens say thank you when you throw them feed?”

Dad smiled.

“Well, actually, they do cluck their thanks.”

“Oh, really. And did that Chinese Pheasant swear at you when you took a shot at him yesterday? Did he mock you for missing?”

Jamie shrugged then and felt guilty.

“Kind of. I’m not doing that any more.”

“Don’t like pheasant meat?”

“Not much. I dunno what I was doing shooting. I don't like guns either.”

Mom brought the sliced roast beef to the table and set it down next to the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the green beans, the rolls and salad.

“Let’s eat,” she said.

Jamie took a roll. He took some butter.

“What’s wrong?” mom said.

“Nothing. I just am trying to figure out what’s going on. We are eating a cow and some beautiful beans and tomatoes and lettuce. Does that mean we are better than all these other living things so we get to eat them?”

Dad looked at mom.

“I never thought about that,” mom said. “What do you think, Harvey?”

Dad smiled.

“It’s impressive that you are thinking, and that you are aware of other living things, Jamie. Most people just take it for granted that people are in charge of the Earth. It just could be that most people are just a bit arrogant and ignorant. Keep on thinking, and do what seems right to you.”

Jamie ate three rolls with butter and skipped the rest.

“I’m not saying I am a vegetarian or anything,” he said. “I have to think about this stuff some more.”

And he had thought more, for years. He did become mostly vegetarian. He sold his shotgun and never fired another gun.

Over the years he brought home stray cats and nursed them. Wilson was the latest and she was now 15 years old, and pretty much ready to pass away, taking regular trips to the vet and eating gourmet cat food.

Jamie petted her and she snuggled his hand.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

He remembered how it was back then when he was a little kid.

He learned about Jane Goodall and the 60 years she spent studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Tanzania. She lived closely with them, but she never said she learned their language or that she and they had a chat.

He respected Goodall and these writers, and he was crazy, in a way, but he couldn't let go of the idea of communicating.

He did have small encouraging experiences like when he was about 12.

One evening just at dusk, a crow hopped up next to his window right where his head was resting on a pillow.

“Hello,” he said to the crow.

“Squawaaaak!”

“Did you come to see me?”

“Whaaak. Waak. Waak Pok…”

“I am not sure what you are saying, but I am listening.’

“Squawaak! Squawaak!”

The crow hopped across the roof and jumped up on a telephone pole.

“Hey, come back!” Jamie opened his window and stuck out his hand with a bit of chocolate bar in his fingers.

“Squeek!”

The crow swooped back down and grabbed the chocolate in his beak, then flapped back up on the pole holding the sweet.

“You going to share it with your friends or eat it?”

The crow tipped back his head and the chocolate disappeared into his mouth.

“Aha, greedy, eh?”

“Squawfff…Squawfff.” The crow swooped back past the window and flapped his wing against the glass, then climbed high in the sky and flew over the neighbor’s rooftop and away.

Crows seemed pretty easy. They did recognize him as he walked around the neighborhood. He talked with them, and they squawked back. It wasn’t “talking,” but it was in the ballpark, like chatting with a dog or a cat.

Why not a tree? Or a flower?

Well, of course, he knew the literal answer. They did not vocally speak.

But his relationship with plants and animals was metaphorical. A kind of poetry. Poetry was his spiritual communion with plants.

From that perspective, he certainly wasn’t the first, by a long shot, or the last. Poets had communed with nature forever.

Of course, there was no reason to think that daffodils or trees would speak to him in words. It was the soulful connection that was important.

He came to see that humans mostly have never found poetry in any form, never experienced a metaphorical way of listening and communing.

So the link between living things could be entirely spiritual and poetic. The conversation could be simple, just not scientific or organic.

Even now, at the age of 70, when Jamie slept, he dreamed of wild roses and trillium and he understood their essence. It was the same with deer or hummingbirds or snails.

When he looked out the window and saw a rainy day, he also saw flowers bathing and later sun warming and drying them.

“Hello,” he said to the cedar in the park when he walked over on Saturday. He sat on a bench beneath the tree and just listened to the breezes pass through its branches. He heard whispers. The tree seemed content.

“Thanks,” he said to the tree. “I love your shade and the peace it gives me to sit here on the bench with you.”

He walked on and then sprawled out on the grass where dandelions were growing.

He watched their yellow blossoms and an ant crawling across one.

“Do you and the ant talk to each other?”

The dandelion dipped when another ant jumped up on it, and then the first ant jumped off.

“I’m trying to learn the language of plants,” he had told his teacher, Mrs. Castle, when he was in fourth grade. “I can see them but I can’t really get a sense of what they are thinking or know if they think.”

“You just keep listening, Jamie,” she said. “You’ll come to understand a lot, even if the trees never say a word.”

Now he walked the streets, talking to dogs and cats and birch trees, roses, hydrangeas, azaleas, spireas, viburnums and all the late tulips and Oregon grape.

He had a feeling he heard something with his heart. He remembered what his mom said years ago.

“Mom,” he said to her then. “ I am never going to really learn the languages of birds and deer, let alone of dogwoods, oaks, apples, am I?”

Mom raised an eyebrow.

“But you are aware they are alive, eh? And you know your life depends on theirs, eh?”

“What, why?”

She just smiled and said maybe he’d find out over time.

But now he did see.

There were fires, floods, hurricanes and ice melting and the polar bears having no place to go. Animals were dying. Wars and disease never stopped. Humans let it all happen when they didn't need to.

He went in the living room and sat in the big chair.

“Nobody does anything about it,” he said out loud.

He went out in the back yard and a crow flew and sat down on top of the garden chair next to him.

“Squawak.”

“You got that right,” he said. “You and I are only going to be around for a little while, but we’re listening and throwing in a comment once in a while.”

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