elegy for the felled

They've started cutting down the oak trees in Memorial Grove. Just within the last hour.

It's like being punched in the gut, to witness or even imagine a tree being toppled by a chainsaw.

There's an ache to it. Yet somehow the ache is spread thin, as if any decent, silent moment the heart might seek in order to grieve the loss of such a formidable elder is drowned out by progress' tinny victory march. It's a uniquely modern ailment. Another great tree falls, another great creature is lost -- and we just sigh, shake it off as best we can and smile bravely into another day. But the loss doesn't escape us, no matter how removed we might feel; something inside us still flinches, still stumbles under the weight of every plummeting 600-year-old trunk, every newly-erected power plant belching soot, every wanton gesture of crazed consumption.

My law firm represents one of the plaintiffs in this case. We raced to assemble a Supreme Court appeal and file it on time. Attorneys were running down the hallways and the secretary was fielding press call after press call (as well as calls from one of the tree sitters, Air, whose voice was low and urgent. "They're cutting!" We know. "Did you file yet?" We will, by 4:00 p.m.). We enlisted two of the neighborhood copy shops to prepare the final versions of the documents. Four of us fanned out into the City to file at the various courts and serve the documents on opposing counsel.

At 3:45 or so I found myself in a big law firm's climate-controlled waiting room on the 20th floor of Two Embarcadero, a gleaming chrome and glass high rise in the heart of downtown San Francisco. I waited for the receptionist to return, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows framing the panorama of the Bay, flanked by two bushy potted palm trees. The industriousness in the building was palpable. I felt like such an unkempt hippie, somehow out of place, and still so thankful that my contact with the world unfolds at ground level.

The lawyers here toiled for months on this case, introducing very promising novel legal theories and waging a remarkably refined fight on behalf of the oak trees. And the tree sitters climbed up into those branches nearly two years ago. All of that work sure bought a lot of time. But despite our best efforts, here comes the machinery, once again clearing the way for taller, bigger, stronger, more.

My mom always implores me not to let things like this affect me. "It's not your pain!" she says. But it is. We're all inextricably interwoven into this community of life -- what impacts one, whether one is a mighty oak tree or a little brown moth, impacts us all.

Nonetheless, the sadness does not serve. All that can be done is to continue.

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone, therefore we must be saved by love." -- Reinhold Neibuhr