What if during your next visit to an aspen grove instead of ooohing and aaahhing at the pretty fall leaves you just stood quietly and listened? What if you could silence the incessant monologue in your head and stand frozen, statue-like, your eyes closed and your heart open? What if you could slow down to the wavelength of the trees and see things as they do? What might that be like? What could you learn? What stories could they tell you?
Are you ready? Let's begin.
I imagine that things would start slowly, perhaps with a drifting, swaying sensation, like that warm comfortable glow just before falling asleep. You'd hear the breeze rustling the leaves above you, feel the warm dance of afternoon sunlight filtering through the golden canopy. The patterns of swaying light falling on your closed eyelids would be mesmerizing, hypnotic. Your human mind tries to resist the temptation to let itself drift along with the aspens, but this is more powerful than sleep or anything else you've ever experienced. At last you succumb and let go of the frenzied humanness that's kept you running for a lifetime.
You begin to perceive sounds that had gone almost unnoticed before: the kiss of wind on leaves, the creak of a nearby pine, the tiny scratchings of insects tunneling through the detritus of the forest floor. A nuthatch pauses, upside down and weightless on the trunk of a tree, watching. You can hear its tiny talons gripping at the bark.
As you relax further you begin to perceive things on a much longer timeframe. By sloooowing down you become aware that under the rustling leaves and in the patterns of green light is an ancient voice - the voice of the aspens - whispering and murmuring. Gradually you understand that you are not alone, in fact never were. There is a non-human presence here among the trees that, while alien, is not at all frightening. It feels natural, more natural than anything you've ever experienced, and you simply accept it.
You hear the large tree beside you start to ask softly:
Do you remember? Do you remember? Do you remember?
And from behind and in front comes a faint chorus of answering voices, identical to the first yet somehow different:
We remember. We remember. We remember.
Do you remember?
We remember.
The trees are talking to themselves, a fugue of voices all whispering at once, slightly out of phase. Their shimmering voices stack upon each other to form one voice.
Do you remember? Yes, we remember.
And then, struck by a sudden epiphany, you realize that the aspen grove, far from being a multitude of trees standing forever separate and distinct as humans do, is actually a single being made up of many individuals all acting together as one entity. Each trunk is but one facet of the whole, their genes identical, their roots intertwined and connected under the dark soil, embracing, and impossible to separate. The grove is one being, one mind, yet many, too. It is the epitome of continuity and togetherness. It is Aspen and it has been here (and elsewhere!) for a very, very long time.
Aspen's whispering thoughts begin to paint pictures in your imagination, weaving stories, telling of things unseen by human eyes: the present, this morning, the distant long forgotten past. Its memory stretches back through time immemorial, encoded in green DNA and copied flawlessly down through uncountable successive generations. Adult Aspen morphs into sucker into sapling and back to adult - all the same being. Sometimes it's difficult to tell if Aspen is speaking of things happening now, this morning, last fall, or a million years ago. Indeed, to it, there is no real difference.
Aspen speaks of patiently waiting for the morning sun to break above the eastern ridge line. Light creeps slowly along forest canopy until it finally falls upon green leaves.
Ahhh, inhale!
Aspen murmurs of the slow joy of drawing water and nutrients skyward from the dark earth, up through white-barked trunks and out to leaf tips. You watch the barely noticeable movement of branch and twig, the subtle angling of leaves toward the warmth of the sun, following the brilliant arc across the sky each day. Rain drops fall softly, sometimes violently. You feel wind, sometimes gentle, sometimes angry. There is bird song and dew glistening on a cold morning. There is the weight of snow and the feel of earthworms wriggling madly among the underground webwork of roots. There is the taste of dung left by a deer or bear or squirrel: a gift of life-giving nutrients.
You hear of long lazy summers filled with sunlight and saplings growing skyward, reaching for the sun. There are so many of these summers - more than you can ever hope to count. Trunks swell and grow to aged adulthood and then are gradually shaded out by taller but slower growing coniferous trees. It is not the end, though, as this is the way of life and it is as it should be. A twig here or a sucker there takes root and passes on the encoded memories of the parent, which, strangely, is actually a copy of itself. This grove dies out but another forms elsewhere and Aspen lives on in continuity and perpetuity.
Sometimes there is the smell of smoke and later the taste of charcoal. It is good. You slumber along with Aspen through cold winters while the great wheel of heaven spins dizzily above bare branches. Chips of light bounce and scatter across black velvet in a mathematically precise yet mysterious dance.
How very odd: You don't recognize any of the constellations. Is this the Earth you know?
Suddenly you see a great wall of ice a mile thick moving southward, pushing waves of boreal forest before it like ripples in a pond. Aspen races ahead, sprinting at top speed. Sometimes it doesn't run fast enough and whole groves, indeed whole mountains covered with trees, are ground under the weight of it. But elsewhere other groves survive and Aspen splits into fragments, sidestepping the thrusting ice like a bullfighter.
The frantic, sometimes giddy race between ice and forest goes on for a long time until ultimately the ice age push slows and stops, its energy exhausted fighting the warming sun of this southern climate. The tide has finally turned and now it is Aspen's turn to chase.
Before the groves split and go separate ways you hear Aspen tell itself:
We will follow the ice back to the great north from whence we came. Those that remain behind will take refuge in mountains and high places away from the heat and dryness. In time, when the ice returns - as it always has - we shall meet again and be whole.
The land shrugs off the great weight of ice, dries, and warms, yet the part of Aspen that stays behind in the south lives on in high alpine retreats, waiting. You catch fleeting glimpses of giant ground sloths and mammoths lumbering under golden Fall canopies. Saber-toothed cats crunch yellow leaves with impossibly large paws. A thousand species of birds fly and sing among the boughs, barely noticed by Aspen they live so fast; you recognize a few warblers and jays, but most you've never seen before.
You realize that the great chase south and the parting of ways has repeated perhaps a dozen times. A hundred times. A thousand? Are you looking at the most recent ice age or one thirty million years past? Aspen doesn't know or even care; from its perspective they are one and the same.
Even Aspen's genetic memory is not limitless. Before the waves of ice is a great vagueness where something else, Aspen but not Aspen, a precursor species perhaps, lived and died on slowly shifting continents. There are hazy recollections of mountains taller than the highest Himalayan peaks, flanks covered with forest, of beaches and steaming jungles filled with shadowy lumbering shapes. These oldest memories are formless and indistinct, hard to make out. You squint hard: something... what...?
[ A flash of light in the night sky followed by heat and eons of Cold and ash. ]
And before that there is only deep time and a sense of important memories forgotten.
Aspen begins to fall silent, its rustling chorus of sing-song voices fading. The story is over and it is time for you to return to the present.
Frightened that the spell will be broken before you can ask it, you desperately cry out the question you most desperately need to know the answer to:
"There are no humans in your story! Where is Mankind? Aspen, is there no place for us?"
The whispering voices are now silent. Not even the leaves rustle. You fear that Aspen has gone, offended by your impudent outburst. Finally, after what seems an eternity in stillness, the terrifying yet somehow comforting answer comes:
Mankind? What is that?
And then the fugue is over and you awaken in darkness, the sound of crickets chirping and countless small creatures all around you. The moon's silver light streams through a break in the trees. Once again you are alone in the aspen grove.
