Story Info
Story Info
Clare DuBois
Jamestown, Colorado, USA
2017
Type of Wounded Place
Story & Experience
Standing by these Aspen trees in staggering beauty—I am saying goodbye to this place ever looking like it has before, because even in the three months since I was last here, it’s almost unrecognisable the tree died off so fast. Broken boughs, snapped trunks, dead trees everywhere—I stood in this gorgeous Grove almost not able to let myself look at the signs that they too were on their way—dying from the bottom up in the same way that Aspen forests all over the mountains have already died. Would I come back to see them again to bear witness to their leaving? I don’t know that I would and yet I’m going back up there again today to complete some filming and I don’t even know if my heart can take it.
I didn’t know what to say to the trees, except ‘I’m sorry’. I don’t know how to be amongst this die off and not feel crazy, split and broken right alongside the trees themselves. No one wants to look. No one wants to feel. Did we even deserve such majesty if we just turned away whilst our own lifestyles and ways of being caused their departure from this world?
Standing by these Aspen trees in staggering beauty—I am saying goodbye to this place ever looking like it has before, because even in the three months since I was last here, it’s almost unrecognisable the tree died off so fast. Broken boughs, snapped trunks, dead trees everywhere—I stood in this gorgeous Grove almost not able to let myself look at the signs that they too were on their way—dying from the bottom up in the same way that Aspen forests all over the mountains have already died. Would I come back to see them again to bear witness to their leaving? I don’t know that I would and yet I’m going back up there again today to complete some filming and I don’t even know if my heart can take it.
I didn’t know what to say to the trees, except ‘I’m sorry’. I don’t know how to be amongst this die off and not feel crazy, split and broken right alongside the trees themselves. No one wants to look. No one wants to feel. Did we even deserve such majesty if we just turned away whilst our own lifestyles and ways of being caused their departure from this world?
Jamestown, Colorado, USA
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