I remember/tread carefully

Josefine R. Narverud saw the performance Treework before the summer. Treework was described as an opera for the trees and the people and was performed in Østmarka outside Oslo. The performance gave a lot of room for one's own interpretations and thoughts. This text is a response to this invitation, written partly immediately after seeing Treework and partly a few months later.

I realize as I write this how difficult it is to describe nature. How it, in its natural imperfect way, wriggles away from everything that can be defined; like gray boxes and asphalt. Nature grows, changes, is lived and experienced in the moment. And is thus indescribable in the sense that it is not dead, but alive. And always changing. 

I remember the tall trees in the middle of the forest. How the light moved through the green leaves. How they whispered and rustled in the wind. 

I remember silence and birdsong 

I remember soft movements against the rough bark of trees, and heather against bare feet.

I remember voices and singing.

I remember walking towards a goal behind one's own back

I remember rolling and crawling in heather and rough terrain

I remember shaking in time with nature's vibrations

I remember the walk and a calmness that is rarely found.

I remember conversations with strangers.

I remember seat pads and children's pins.

I remember mosquito spray on the walk and the sound of gravel.

The crowd, the audience and the hosts of the show, move along the forest paths, quiet small talk passes between them, while the forest grows denser. Calm descends over my shoulders and my thoughts fly quietly and freely among the treetops. A contrast to the busy cityscape we had just left, where no thoughts can live freely. 

We approach. The performers wear white costumes and are therefore easy to spot as they sit among the green of nature itself, while we find our places in the heather. While the performers do not move a muscle, we in the audience sit in silence and watch the trees breathing in the wind. Eternity.

Edvard Munch once said that flowers would grow from his dead and decaying body, that in them he would be eternal. 

The age rings wound their way through our skin. Surrounding us with the years we have survived. As living proof that we still are. And always will be.

The athletes' sudden bursts of movement are an almost irreverent contrast to the silence that surrounds us. Their voices are loud about schedules, dinner, training routines, and something in a language I don't understand. Things that at the moment seem completely unimportant. 

Nature preserves our traces like scars. Preserves our secrets that are whispered about in the Treetops, under the Moss and in the Heather. Nature breathes out its melodies into Eternity. The same melodies that we breathe in. Like an eternal dance we live like waves crashing along the rocky cliffs. Giving and taking, they are a part of us as we are a part of them. Their branches extend like blood vessels in our bodies, in our lungs that we use to breathe the same air as the trees themselves. 

The performers fall silent. Their movements become calmer and more appropriate to the surroundings. Natural elevations become stages and the sunlight becomes the spotlight. Their voices harmonize with the wind.

The human voice should vibrate in time with the voice of the forest as it sways in the wind, I remember thinking as I heard their voices against the bark of the trees.

The performers surround the fallen tree in the middle of the stage. The melodies have become laments as they honor a lost life.

We must tread carefully, I thought. A broken branch is a cracked vein. A felled tree, a strangled person. 

We must tread carefully, I thought. The path must not be too wide, otherwise how will the next ones be able to walk freely to find the path that has not yet been walked.

We must tread carefully, I thought. We must be able to hear nature's lamentations and melodies, for how else will we be able to give back what they have given us. How else will we be able to right our wrongs. 

We must tread carefully. 

I think.