If a You Fell in the World Would You Make a Sound? A Semester with a Tree -Created By Michael Lees in the Linear Year of 2013- Welcome to your tree journal. Over the duration of the semester, you will find and meet a tree in a space and place on campus of your choosing. This tree journal will involve inner and outer perceptions, reflections, and contemplations relating to class dynamics as well as your own life happenings. The tree journal is a time for you to reflect upon and share with someone else, a someone else whom just so happens to be a tree. So meet and greet your tree, listen to your tree’s voice and listen to what that tree may share with you. The question reflections for each of the journal entries serve as a guide for your thoughts and ideas. Use the questions found in each section as a tool to work with. You are not limited to only those questions, as you may want to add your own ideas as well. If you want to respond to the questions in the form of a poem, writing, sketch, work of art, or a song feel free! You may also choose or feel inspired to respond to the numerous voices found throughout this booklet as a way to work with your entries as well. These entries will be a part of the final project and supplement your main journal for this course so make sure to keep up with the journal and most of all have fun befriending a tree! Tree Journal Entry One – Week One …What relations can hold between the real world and fictional worlds? Can real people interact with fictional characters? We are likely to feel that fictional worlds are insulated or isolated, in some peculiar way, from the real world, that there is a logical or metaphysical barrier between them. That, indeed, is why we call them different “worlds”. – Kendall L. Walton Voices: #56 – Jack Kerouac Imaginary judgments about things, in this Nothing-Ever-Happened wonderful Void, you don’t even have to reject them, let alone accept them. “That looks like a tree, let’s call it a tree,” said Coyote to Earthmaker at the beginning, and they walked around the rootdrinker patting their bellies. Question Reflections for Journal Entry: Find a tree on campus that you would like to spend the semester hanging out with, introduce yourself, and draw a picture of this newfound tree friend for next class. What is your tree friend’s name? How did your tree friend get here? What is your tree friend’s background, life story? What does your tree friend have to do? Tree Journal Two – Week 3 Voices: Changing – Barbara Meyn It happens quietly. A maple seed blown here by a sudden random wind sprouts beneath the bedroom wall, grows before I quite know how it grew, tops the eaves, seeking afternoon as well as morning sun, and fills my life. Leaves unfold like ragged green umbrellas waiting for an April rain. I tell myself it’s just another tree that could have been dug up when it was small and planted farther from the house. If I don’t cut it soon, if I keep on watching while it reaches for the sky, delighting in its gray, sinewy trunk, the soft touch of leaves when I walk by, the way it gathers light on winter days and pours it generously through the glass, it won’t be long until it moves my house off its foundation. The room is full of curious, precious things, skin of mole, hawk feathers, moth cocoons, deer’s-foot rattle, dry seed pods of zygadene, racemes of saxifrage. And now across the walls maple leaves sign to me in shadows. Though the tree is not yet in the room, in the dark I hear it whisper, I know it’s coming in. Question Reflections for Journal Entry What does your tree friend like to do? What is your tree friend’s attitude towards life? What is your tree friend’s philosophy on life? Tree Journal Three – Week 5 Voices: Breaklight – Lucille Clifton Light keeps on breaking. i keep knowing the language of other nations. i keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean. and light just keeps breaking. last night the fears of my mother came knocking and when i opened the door they tried to explain themselves and i understood everything they said. Voices: Time and Motion and Space – Simon Ortiz Time and motion and space: pine and fir, the wind, lichen on sunwarm flat rock, a road below in the valley, voices of friends, ourselves. “Pine song,” she said. Butterfly comes by. And then Bee all dressed in bright yellow and black. “This is the way it is.” “I’m not just making it up.” Voices: How Much Coyote Remembered – Simon Ortiz O, not too much. And a whole lot. Enough. Voices: Some Trees – John Ashbery There are amazing: each joining a neighbor, as though speech were a still performance. Arranging by chance to meet as far this morning from the world as agreeing with it, you and I are suddenly what the trees try to tell us we are: That their merely being there means something; that soon we may touch, love, explain. And glad not to have invented such comeliness, we are surrounded: A silence already filled with noises, a canvas on which emerges a chorus of smiles, a winter morning. Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, our days put on such reticence these accents seem their own defense. Question Reflections for Journal Entry How does your tree friend think about other beings? People? Does your tree friend have a lot of friends or just some friends? Why? Does your tree friend trust the world surrounding it? Why or Why Not? Does your tree friend enjoy the companionship of a loved one? Friends? Family? Or does your tree friend like to be alone? Tree Journal Entry Four – Week Seven Voices: ‘the universe is part of ourselves’ – Robin Blaser we have been everywhere, suddenly, and twisted the clarities into bottles and casements it was the lintel concerned us we walked through and wondered above us the larks of heaven perch and nothing over the walls, the vision gossips like rivers, and wishes, marvelous, perishes we have been everywhere, suddenly, glorious texture the chorus added eagerness, swiftness intellect whispers, meanders, softly landed remarkable pons and cattails the ferns dream as they return to green the efformation, the dis-creation, the kindness of fragments the larks of heaven perch and nothing – for bp Nichol Voices: Interlunar Thoughts – Robin Blaser ‘Advertising tells us who we are’ and ‘presents a completely integrated culture’ in the interval between the old moon and the new when the moon is invisible, one hopes the moon will show up: capitalism, racism, consumerism, homophobia, sexism- all of them systems of signifiers detached from spirit so the governing soul goes numb (a voice on CBC set alongside John Wilkinson on John Wieners) Voices: Sitting Under Tree Number Two – Jack Kerouac But the undrawables, the single musical harp rainbow’s blue green shimmer of a cobweb – the line of thread swimming in the wind, blue & silver at intervals that appear & disappear- 7 song along the rim tying to the plant as birds twurdle over those massy fort trees populous with song – imaginary blossoms in my eye moving across the page with definite oily rainbow water holes & rims of beaten gold, with toads of old silver. Golden fast ant back in the hay now fromming its feelers thru the thicket of time then darting across mud looking for more trees – A little ant bit my ass & I said Eesh with my wad of gum – I itch & pain all over with hate of time & tedium Save me! Kill me! Voices: Kopis’Taya (A Gathering of Spirits) – Paula Gunn Allen Because we live in the browning season the heavy air blocking our breath, and in this time when living is only survival, we doubt the voices that come shadowed on the air, that weave within our brains certain thoughts, a motion that is soft, imperceptible, a twilight rain, soft feather’s fall, a small body dropping into its nest, rustling, murmuring, settling in for the night. Because we live in the hard-edged season, where plastic brittle and gleaming shines and in this space that is cornered and angled, we do not notice wet, moist, the significant drops falling in perfect spheres, that are the certain measures of our minds; almost invisible, those tears, soft as dew, fragile, that cling to leaves, petals, roots, gentle and sure, every morning. We are the women of daylight; of clocks and steel foundries, of drugstores and streetlights, of superhighways that slice our days in two. Wrapped around in glass and steel we ride our lives; behind dark glasses we hide our eyes, our thoughts, shaded, seem obscure, smoke fills our minds, whisky husks our songs, polyester cuts our bodies from our breath, our feet from the welcoming stones of earth. Our dreams are pale memories of themselves, and nagging doubt is the false measure of our days. Even so, the spirit voices are singing, their thoughts are dancing in the dirty air. Their feet touch the cement, the asphalt delighting, still they weave dreams upon our shadowed skulls, if we could listen. If we could hear. Let’s go then. Let’s find them. Let’s listen for the water, the careful gleaming drops that glisten on the leaves, the flowers.