Tree Bones

Eno River State Park, Durham, North Carolina

A downed tree split in half

Its innards spiraled up to the sky in twists and swirls of golden wood

Chips and shavings spill out onto the forest floor

I stop and marvel at the lines and the curves and the beauty of it all

The art of nature

But is it right to marvel?

Is this sight even beautiful?

Would I marvel at a human corpse

Flayed before me?

Their intestines, their liver, their guts

Exploded onto the ground

Splattered blood everywhere

I don’t think I would

So where’s the difference?

What creature

Might behold my corpse with awe and wonder

Appreciate the lines and the curves

What would call my bloated body beautiful?

A crow

Perhaps

A vulture

Maybe

Sightless fungi

Certainly

I turn

And am confronted with conveniently-placed wooden steps down a hill

Tree bones, I think

How many tree bones have I stepped on over the years without appreciating the sacrifice of the tree?

Would I come to ignore steps made of human femurs and tibias in time?

Probably,

Knowing how much we’re able to normalize

The whole built world is tree bones

And temporarily-affixed stone

Minerals

Oil

The bits and guts and blood of the earth

Momentarily assembled for human use

But it’s all temporary

It will all fade away

In time,

These tree-bones-as-steps will decay

I will decay

In a hundred years, something will borrow my molecules

In a thousand, something else

In a million, a being I can’t even imagine

There is beauty in insignificance

Say the chickadees as they flutter around me

Says the soft babbling of a small creek

Love it and embrace it