September Newsletter: Where the Forest Meets the Field
I am thinking of trees. Of their language -- to one another, to us. And of their sense of time -- a sentence or a song takes a century. Repeating every year, returning and radiating and growing in intensity, rings of sound reaching out and up and down. This sense of scale and time and quiet presence offers solace, a moment of rest from the horrors and injustice that surround us.
On a soundwalk this week I sat between two sycamores on the Kokosing River, perhaps three centuries old apiece. Both trees lean toward the water (one at 45 degrees), yearning to be close. I think of them as beacons, seen from far away as markers, indicating water nearby. Or, I imagine the sycamores as records, archives, witnesses: of farmers and cleared fields, of past dense forests, of white settlers, of Shawnee, Delaware, and Wyandot peoples cruelly forced to leave, and before them the early Adena farmers, and even further back to ancient Mound Builders and nomadic people, taking a moment of rest beneath the shade of these sycamore’s ancestors.
I am also thinking of the destruction of forests on the west coast, the Amazon, and countless other places. The root of this destruction is obviously greed and ignorance and cruelty and the environmental destruction of industry and capital. But it is also a failure of imagination and empathy: a failure to pay attention, a failure to hear that centuries-old song, reaching out and up and down. My best, Brian
ART OF TREES AT KENYON COLLEGE
I'm excited to be a visiting artist this year through the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, where I'll be working with students and community members on socially distant sound walks and listening sessions for the gallery's "Art of Trees" project. We've already had several sessions over the past two weeks, including the Pine Grove and sites near the Miller Observatory at the The Brown Family Environmental Center.
My friend Nathaniel, always good with a turn of phrase, recently said that while visiting a farm as a child, his “favorite moment always” was “where the forest meets the field.” And he’s right: it is a threshold where everything changes, two different environments and soundscapes coming together. The picture above shows just such a place, where I sat under an American Elm and listened to the valley below, and the life in the fence rows, and the wind slowly pushing the trees and making them sing. And again in the picture below, where I walked a path with students between a quiet forest and a clamorous prairie filled with late-summer crickets and cicadas.
FOREST LISTENING ROOMS FEATURED IN NATIONAL FOREST FOUNDATION ARTICLE
I recently had the opportunity to speak with the National Forest Foundation. Below is a nice article from them, featuring the recording and community work that I have been doing in the Wayne National Forest in Ohio.