Monday, April 12, 2010

Temporary shouldn't be your everyday...

Think I’m serious about radio and writing?



Spend ten minutes with me in a forest of life filled naturally planted assorted trees blessed with needles and leaves and you’ll be gasping for the opportunity to escape from the thoughts and processes of a poet who vowed to never steal from the often assumed but never truly explained rings centered in the core of the greatest storytellers on earth.



Trees and me—Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards…those long slender trunks stuck feet first into a chunk of mud do something to me that scream, “Nothing else matters…come sit next to me and we’ll spend the afternoon discussing the black squirrels that mysteriously appeared one day. We’ll watch as a Copperhead slithers by stealing nothing from you yet humankind believes it has the right to do as it does forgetting any snake has the ability to keep other pests away.”



In 1997 I wrote a letter to the National Forest Service begging for attention—my trees were quickly passing without explanation and there was nothing beneath them that would guarantee a new generation of growth. I remember writing daily in journals about my fears having nothing to do with me but rather other writers and musicians who might walk into the same area one day to pull from the air a lyric or rhythm to be shared with a willing passerby.



The Forest Service guided me the entire way—so much so the Boy Scouts of America volunteered to help plant over 17 hundred trees along a path that has now been taken over by White Tail deer, beaver, hawks, big loud owls, moles, water bugs and everything else an inner city forest isn’t supposed to have but we do.



Part of the journey required me to research the lay of the land—not how man came by one day and elected to flatten all he could reach but to dig deeper into the soil to locate nearly untold Carolina history. If enough of us took the time to listen to the wind as it tells the tales of who was there a zillion chapters before your grandparents, the thought about cutting down trees might in fact lead you to believe that everything you do is far worse than the government creating new thoughts and ideas then taxing your kids.



Not even five miles from my favorite place to write rests three incredibly large boulders—one is bigger than a house while another rests over an eroded hillside offering protection to anything and everyone willing to walk inside. During the 1400’s these stones and the trees that have come then gone served as a roof with four walls to a tiny nation of Native American’s who called this area home.



Before Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims and Lewis and Clark taking off to discover the Pacific Northwest there was life in the rolls of the land that seems flat at first glance until the moment you decided to walk forward discovering that each time you tried to tell yourself to stop led to a discovery worth holding.



For those who would argue that life is but temporary—their story isn’t; nor are the rocks and single seed family of trees that still remain. If you spent ten minutes wrapped up in a coat of who stood here before you, there’d be no reason to take a summer vacation away from Carolina…what is hidden is beginning to call out to the people who are caught on the corner of walk and don’t walk.



The IPad sold just over 300,000 during its debut day. As one comedian said, “Wow…that means only 300,000 were able to grasp onto what they assumed they were missing.” For ten minutes the owners discovered technology at its Apple best while the other 48 billion in America patiently waited for versions two and three knowing one day the IPad will have what we’re truly missing, “A guarantee that we’ll be here tomorrow.”



Ouch!



Temporary are the materialistic articles that which we place in the chapters we write. Not even six months ago the hottest, craziest, had to have item was a ticket to Avatar. Oh yeah…fifteen bucks a ticket wasn’t bad at the time, you had a credit card…tack on the price of popcorn and a drink—with interest and the bank will make more than James Cameron.



Is the life of a tree temporary? I’m ready to argue. Most trees last longer than you and me. The only one who seems to be measuring are those carrying cutters and single handled rakes that are created to take the stress off the back. Yet I never hear a tree complain about how wind tends to bend it this way, that way and then way, way over here during storms that scare the ba-jeeb-bees out of the Copperheads and memories of nations nobody talks about anymore.



I began my day today wondering what I did yesterday. Three incredibly strong trees that no longer featured leaves and or needles to stop the heart of two people falling in love or someone trying to participate with the world so they walk through a forest to regain the inner strength to move on; each of the three trees have been beside me for 17 summers…that's when I moved in...they were there several pages before me...

For me, they stood proud the day I was married in the forest behind my house and every picture I've held features their bright beautiful bark covered smiles and waves.



Branches weighing a million pounds began to fall. Woodpeckers no longer stopped for breakfast, lunch and dinner…it was if Mother Nature had been hired to haul away these storytellers and ultimately they’d fall to the ground in the arms of rabbits needing a new place to leap over, dogs that required a new echo to bounce off their barks, for writers to sit on during puzzling sentences caught somewhere in their head or heart or termites needing a new diet.



Three trees that have been with me since the moment a writing instrument elected to seize control of an imagination that never sleeps…and today, their circles are neatly stacked in piles in the very forest that protected them during unexpected battles with the cold or major league downpours connected to hurricane Hugo and before. I gave each limb a new beginning—a place to rest, I know how bad my legs hurt standing up for a few hours…can you imagine almost 40 years?



Were the trees temporary?



To someone who has never been to the forest I vowed to protect…yes. To a poet whose words are preserved in boxes, presented on web pages and or shoved onto bookshelves worldwide…those trees are forever—because somewhere, sometime, in a chapter I assumed would never exist…the energy from those trees will pop off that page and inspire a new writer to share a thought that could change the shape of the wind.



arroecollins@clearchannel.com

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