When I was a little girl my parents went to see a movie called
Silent Running, "an environmentally themed American science fiction film..." They went to the drive in with my brother and I after our bedtime. We were supposed to fall asleep on the backseat of the car, but I had insomnia from the time I was 3 until I was 26. So I positioned myself for a good view of the film, pretended to be asleep and watched a movie about a time when there would be no plants(although I remember it as trees) left on earth. They had been destroyed by human ignorance and destruction. The only plants that existed were in 3 pods in a space station being taken care of by a few astronauts and droids.
No trees left on earth. Even as a child I was horrified by this thought. I wasnt sophisticated enough to know that without trees our atmosphere would probably not hold enough oxygen for human life to exist. I only imagined a dry and barren dusty planet devoid of color and life as I knew it. I was already too scared to watch, but needed to see what happened. It only got worse.
The project was defunded and the astronauts were ordered to blow up the pods and return to earth.
No plant life left anywhere in the Universe.
I knew what a Universe was and I was already frightened of infinity. The idea of endless fathoms of deep dark space filled my insides with infinite fear. The farther I traveled from earth in my mind the more terrified I became, the more lost and lonely I felt. Or did seeing the movie coupled with my father's lectures on science and infinity create these fears? Memory is trickery.
I was so absolutely devastated by the thought of blowing up these trees that my heart would burst, and then, one man decided to try to save them.
He started killing people to prevent the plants and trees from being destroyed. My young naive mind could not comprehend or justify this violence. I wanted the trees to live, but the good man saving them was now a bad man killing people. I was confused. I wanted it all to end so badly that I wished I was "out like a light" as my family called it, like my brother.
I was silently sobbing at the end of the movie as the last pod of trees-mostly evergreens-was catapulted into space and the good/bad man killed himself in a huge explosion in outer space.
And throughout these catastrophic events as I remember them, and I am aware that emotions focus the memory in distorted ways, Joan Baez sang hauntingly.
I was so young during this experience, that I had trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality. I was obviously already connected strongly to trees, and sensitive to the human tendency toward devastation and violence. However, I had not yet realized what role plants played for me. I consider them my equal. I can almost hear them talking to me. They draw me to listen and observe the way of nature-the greater nature of the Universe. I accept their generosity and admire their selflessness. We eat them, we heal with them, we build our homes with them, we perfume ourselves and our atmospheres with them, we use them as decoration and decorate them-at Christmas time while they die slowly in buckets of water-and yet I never sense any bitterness. If I believed in hierarchy I would regard them far above us on an evolutionary scale, scientifically or spiritually, and consider the fact that we eat and use them in reverse like the alpha cat who grooms his betas-Nature in her wisdom taking care of all creatures.
A tree sits in one place for hundreds of years adapting to its surroundings while we run around using and changing our environment to suit our own needs in the name of progress. My zen masters are the trees.
My joy is the rich and colorful abundance of miracles that exist and thrive on Earth.
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