A Forest Retreat

 

Your Brother Charlie recently spent a few nights "sleeping rough", on a quiet hilltop patch of mixed fir, birch and cedar forest.  I began making these "poor-man's retreats" some years ago, as an affordable alternative to the 4-figure price tags charged by the buddhist Retreat Centers in my part of the country (I don't begrudge any of those folks a fair return on providing the unique experience that they do, I just live too frugally to comfortably afford it myself).

from my journal entry of April 17:

     The Cedar Cisters have been

      singing to me again this morning, 
      as they have throughout my stay.  Gree-greee, greeee; whahh-gree.
      Just in a breath of wind, mind you, does the one rub on the other, I found.
      Gre-gre-greeee.  Gusts enough to move all the other sisters in the clutch
      don't make this music, no.

     After grooving on their melodies, whenever at random the perfect wind

     shifted just the tops of these two trees, on my last day here I let myself go
     to see exactly which two they were.  Let go, that is, of the limitation of mind 

     priorly held, that to not know the individuals, differentiated from the rest of

     the nursery, was best.

     What I found was that one's Branch, rubbing on the others' Trunk, had worn

     a big patch barkless.  A bare length of maybe a half metre's length,
     providing strings upon which her sister's branch - once alive but now
     redundant and likewise bare - sawed forth and back, as a bow upon a fiddle.

     Thank you, Cisters, for your foresty songs!