To be quiet with my mouth, letting only the rapid and
plentiful thoughts in my brain out via neural pathways that cause the hand to
move the ink pen across this vast blank surface. A canvas. A landscape, really.
White but not cold and snowy. Just smooth and clear – ready to receive. Open.
Expectant? The paper once a tree.
Who knows what type of tree? And surely something added that turns once-tall-strong-tree-wood into a flat smooth surface, white as the underbelly of an orca. Less scarred, perhaps, than a mammal body. Although sometimes I do see a fleck in the paper – what others would call an imperfection. And there I am, seeing a beautiful speck of wood that has somehow escaped the re-coloration project. A beautiful tenderness, a reminder that even this now-inanimate (“still-life”) notebook was once burgeoning with life: a seed fertilized that sprouted up out of soil and then grew into saplinghood, small tree, and maybe even a larger tree than that. Years? How many before the tree was sawed down – annoying, cryingly loud whine of a chainsaw, no doubt. Then the lonely close-ended trip to the mill - pulped or not, shipped over oceans and back again, or not.
Uprooted – cut from the source. Less like roots up, though. More like a severing or dismembering. And here I am with the flat smooth thick off-white page – scrawling this blue ink in scribbled messy lines until there is littler, still, left of the original tree beauty. Cut off from itself. Stump in the ground – at least for a while.
I picture all the forests I’ve known – hardwood, softwood, old-growth, the redwood one in which I recently walked with my family in a déjà vu state from memories even further north of here. I see the replanted, homogeneous forests of cultivated areas – less forests and more farm-like – from which the wood will be extracted over and over again.
I see all these places, including the trees we called “the bushes” on our own growing-up property, a magical place of games, hiding, one muddy fall, imagination and secrets, cops and robbers, Batman and Robin. Bikes pulling up to my favorite low branch for “gasoline” at the pump.
All these flash through as I try to imagine or conjure the source of this very page. All of the sheets from a single tree in one forest, bound into this sketchbook from Beaverton, Oregon? Sketch, yes. If I tried to draw, maybe the sketchbook pages could capture visual images of all these forests...all the possible trees from which the paper came…the givers of life, the sacrificed ones for this rectangular recipient of random ramblings.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
