ohOn solstice night, a gale struck trees, scattered sticks. Around every tree in the park, especially the limes and ash, was a shadow of branches and twigs, mostly dead bras cut from the living branches, thrown down to rot in the earth.
Before decay and recycling of nutrients back to the tree roots by 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, these things are surely random arrangements of windswept material from trees that don’t have to be symbols of anything to matter. Whatever their ecological or cultural significance, these bits of tree-rich litter do not exist solely by what they are made of or what they do. They are things with enough strangeness to be themselves.
Individually and collectively they withdraw Saproxylicathe realm of dead wood. This is the teeming, living 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 decay. The force of the storm shook starlings out of the limelight and caused all sorts of damage, but its relationship with trees is also aesthetic – a violent, terrifying beauty that releases such mysterious energy as it rips through tree branches, bends and breaks trunks, tugs at the roots as if to pluck them from the ground and throw them into the air.
When the wind flies away or dies, its history is written in the poetry of sticks. They sing of tipping the balance 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 decay.
