Like Roy, I too secretly wish that by mimicking slowness, stillness, I too can become one of them. In her book, Roy reflects upon what it means to not simply be a tree, but of the process of becoming one: to sense time, feel intimacy, (un)know gender, process grief, and find death (and rebirth) like a tree. My response to them is a curious whisper to match, a question read, hushed, from Sumana Roy’s 2017 book How I Became a Tree, “What was the scope of making mistakes in the emotional economy of a tree’s life?” The leaves chatter back an immediate rustle, almost admonishing do they mean to say they make mistakes all the time, or is there no room for error or eroticism in the aesthetics of flora? Training myself to walk slower, to take gentler footsteps and feel the shifting textures of the moist earth, I pass trees that mimic the seasons: the calm maroon rage, the many pluralisms of green, and the memory of yellow in the autumn woods. As I trudge through, the trees breathe with the breeze and me, with the cold, the stream speaks and whispers, and the sun glints past an imposing yet generous canopy in Boase Wood. The Lade Braes is a kind meandering walk that twists itself, like an apology, through the heart of Saint Andrews in Scotland. I read Sumana and remember my longing for you, to you, as a tree. ‘The poetry of trees is, after all, about agency-the act of breaking, rending, repairing, citing through metaphor.
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Reading Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree in the Lade Braes, Scotland.