My mom is not exactly your normal mom. In many ways she is. She is middle aged, sweet to some, loves cooking, and her first priority is her family. She can talk about shopping, or Oprah, or lack of grandchildren, or whatever else a woman her age would be interested in. Yet she’s different. And, according to her, she has always experienced reality differently. She can still remember her childhood, seeing things that others could not. She saw fairies; not in a movie, or dreaming about them, but actually saw them. They played an integral part in her childhood, and she searched in her small farming village for something that would help explain these entities that others could not see. This led her to her local library, a tiny converted farmhouse where she would check out volumes of books each week, starting with A and working her way through the children’s section until she finished at Z. After that, she tried to work her way through the adult literature section backward, this time starting at the end of the alphabet. She quickly abandoned the project, as an eight-year-old could not quite stomach the naturalism of Emil Zola.
Even today, she has a pretty good working memory of those books that she read so long ago. The list is quite impressive, especially since she is dyslexic. But she learned how to read before anyone ever taught her, which worked to her advantage, since struggling through a simple book, being told to “sound it out” might have been enough to push her off reading altogether. So luckily she took it upon herself to learn how to read, and today she swallows books, able to complete most in just a few sittings. Yet she learned her lesson from the likes of Zola – that maybe all literature is not her thing. Today she tends toward science fiction and fantasy, genres that leave the gritty cityscape of 19th century Paris behind for a world in which creatures communicate across temporal, spatial, and dimensional barriers. It is a place where anyone can gain an ally or enemy from any walk of life. I grew up with my mother taking me on nightly forays to Narnia or Middle Earth, and, although I do not read as much sci-fi or fantasy as my mother does, I still find I have a soft spot for dragons, allegories, and galaxies far, far away.
It took her many years to come to terms with what she saw as a child. She spent much of her adolescence not speaking about her experiences, as in a rural farming community of a few thousand, there were no outlets for such discussions besides the explanation of an overactive imagination. Later in life, she found kindred spirits in the place where weirdness is valued – Santa Cruz. Personally, I have not seen any fairies, Ents, trolls, or goblins, but I still believe in the unseen. I am perfectly willing to believe that Bigfoot exists, or that energy is tangible. I am willing to believe in Aliens, in ESP, in sacred shapes, in the Illuminati. I can believe that there are evil forces trying to destroy us, just as there are benevolent forces trying to do good. I believe that we are the makers of our world, born unto us, and god exists so long as we don’t forget to feed it.
The last time I saw my mother, she told me that everyone should be friends with a tree, and it got me thinking. I realized that I do interact with the nonhuman world all the time. I have spent hours, years in fields, in groves, in places of nonhuman significance, yet I have never considered my communication with such as an identifiable source of support and camaraderie. But who should one consider a friend? And how should one define a friendship with a nonspeaking entity? I do not swap stories with a tree, or discuss movies. I do not tell it secrets, or ask its advice. I guess it is a different kind of kinship. It could be defined by the enjoyment of their company by providing shade. Or the feeling of relating when it’s blisteringly hot out and its leaves, like your shirt, look a little worse for wear. It could be the feeling of frustration when you notice how many spiders it is hiding in its branches, or relief when it comes back the next spring.
Or maybe it is understanding that these beings are very much connected to us, in constant communication, but in ways our senses cannot possibly coordinate. So perhaps being friends with a tree is not so much as simple as choosing a tree, but seeing the tree for what it is, across the spatial, temporal and dimensional limits of our senses. We can learn to appreciate the being like a good fantasy novel, by the world that it allows us to experience, along with the commiseration of shared realities.
Bodies of Water 