I. Detachment

We’re up against cartoon hippies, the supervisor says into his cell phone. They literally chained themselves to the fuckin’ trees.

No corporate bulldozer could break the links forged between you and this place. You once played in these woods; the earth is compacted in perfect footholds, branches finger-grooved from gripping climbers, mutual promises to hold and behold. You know these trees like you know the face of your mother. Imaginary friends, outgrown, echo old confessions through the understory. When you search for peace behind closed eyes, birdsong is your lullaby, soil your scented candle.

For those who prefer linoleum squeaks and eau de plastique, there’s already a shopping center fifteen minutes away. These businessmen can flaunt their bribed permits for a copy-paste job till the super-death of the sun; you refuse to accept it.

Outrage is an overstretched thing. So many people live in anger, yet don’t have the character to choose what is right over what is most immediately convenient for them. As if we needed another one… taxpayer waste at work again and nooooo not the treeeees goes the comment section under a coming soon announcement.

Seven of you stand in defiance.

Only seven have the courage to fight false progress.

Your chains aren’t tight, but they do restrict your movement. Your left arm can’t be extended to full length. The climbing harness is snug against your body, purposefully difficult for an outsider to wrest loose, and sometimes the tree bark chafes a gap at the small of your back.

It’s a claustrophobic battle. But you do not mind.

Buddha enlightened one man without a word, raising a lone flower to convey the ungraspable. The tree at your spine injects an almighty spark of faith that — given a chance — that brief window for satori — the land development boss will come around. If you can make him see that these trees are alive like you, then he will change his mind. He will spare them for the same reason that he would not murder a human being. Empathy is the enemy of destruction.

You stand your ground.

II. Germination

Your wild-grown heart sparked alive with the stealing of cherries.

Are you hungry? Kana asked, one day, during the dull oven bake of summer. Come with me — the farmer’s cherry tree is ready.

Your older cousin never donned shoes. She recklessly squashed over fallen cherries fermenting under the sun, crawling with parades of well-fed ants. Kana carried the harvest home in her shirtfront and pitted them gruesomely with her bare fingers to ensure you wouldn’t choke.

That day made a beautiful massacre of her. Stained soles and dripping fingertips. Spattered clothes and overflowing mouthfuls. The dark cherry juice looked so much like blood, in its own thin, purplish way, that it lit an epiphany along every nerve of your growing body. These, too, were living things. You communed with the cherry tree later, alone, searching for kinship in the branches. You spat pits to the ground, wondering if they would grow. You made a massacre of yourself. Two years later, a development made a massacre of the cherry tree. No more runaway afternoon snacks. No more tie-dyeing your play shorts with juices. No more chainsaws, you decided then. No more.

Your cousin Kana is here, too.

She mourns the cherries alongside you, but they were not her epiphany. Hers, she told you in confidence, came when a boy carved his heart into a tree trunk for her. She felt its pain as acutely as if his pocketknife were skinning her own arm. She’d screamed for him to stop, and the boy who claimed to love her suddenly called her a freak.

How’s everyone holding up? Kana calls from her tree.

The group boasts about keeping strong, feeling good. But doing this does take a physical toll on each of you.

Dr. Naoki Miyazawa, your mentor, keeps stretching his bad back the best he can. His coworker from the institute sneezes late-spring pollen. Kana brought sunblock, but even this cannot prevent the UV from flaring her rosacea. It burns a red, bumpy blush across her cheeks. She picks at the tiny pustules now and then — a habit gently chided by her partner, who is harnessed shoulder-to-shoulder with Kana.

Your teenage knee injury threatens to act up, tendons stiff and overstrained by days of standing still.

Nevertheless. You say, I feel serene.

And you do. This protest may be perilous, naïve, even futile. Your joints might be stiffening, your skin sensitive, your heart over-labored. None of this can reach your soul.

You stare at the sky between tree boughs, watching clouds gather in swollen, beautiful hues of gray. The fine hairs along your arms goosebump to attention, and you remember your grandmother’s throaty voice explaining how trees raise their leaves before rain, nature’s knowledge an endless, superior mystery.

You feel as if something is taking root.

III. Seedling

The third-best way to determine a tree’s age is by cutting it down. The second-best way is by planting it yourself. The very best way is to relinquish your human hunger for hard answers.

Naoki is pleased with a half-answered life, and it was the paradox of that personal philosophy with his extensive professional research that drew you to his mentorship. He, if anyone, is the “ringleader” of this protest. Quiet need not equal complicit. This has been Naoki’s lesson. He still knows a great many things.

Rain jewels the woodland greenery into shining, gloomy magnificence. You swear you can feel the surge of each droplet soaking your mountain sandals, rushing up to cool the arthritic flame in your left knee, satiating your thirst from the inside. Our noses inform so much of what we taste; petrichor pleasantly soils the roof of your mouth.

C’mon, dude, we got jobs to do. The grunt men on scene are not pleased. Their boss at headquarters even less so.

We’re doing our jobs, too, Naoki says. Protecting the defenseless.

Scoffs and eyerolls. These men do not respect their own world, but it is not their fault. They were raised to believe that superstores supply goods, not Mother Nature, as though computer servers 3D-print their strawberries and smart phones emit oxygen from their charging ports. Their boss pours himself champagne in a high-rise after deciding who will be able to feed their children that week. If the men cannot cut down these trees, then their boss’s decision will be no one.

Still, your group is left in peace. For now.

Kana’s rosacea has pitted her face with dark, protruding bumps, but with her partner’s murmured jokes to distract her, she manages to leave them be. Leave them be. That is the heart-wish all of you urge into reality through this noble hardship. Leave them be.

A sliver of forest litter is caught in Naoki’s rain-beaded beard. The student on his right points it out, and a few of you laugh at his exaggerated attempt to see his own lips. I’ll get it, you offer, because you are the only one within reach.

You pinch the pine needle. Resistance. Naoki flinches, and it plucks free from his skin.

IV. Sapling

What you do to a tree, Naoki says, you do to your own child.

The supervisor gives a derisive laugh. Don’t be ridiculous.

Who’s being ridiculous?

Naoki had a child once. The little boy suffered an asthma attack on a hot walk home from school. Every time Naoki lectures on the air quality difference between a green-incorporated city and a greenless city — the temperature difference between sidewalks exposed to direct sun and sidewalks lined with trees — his pleas are personal. He knows he cannot change the past, but he also knows that we ourselves are someone else’s past, holding their fate in our hands.

Your hair itches. You haven’t seen a mirror for three weeks: the margin for comfort is too narrow for nonessentials, your mission too important to compromise for vanity. But if the others are anything to go by, this tickle comes from the poke of little leaf sprouts along your scalp.

The growth was easiest to notice on Naoki’s bald coworker and your buzzcut PhD peer. Their heads are mossing over, crowned by fine shoots, as if Nature wants to protect her children from cold by knitting them mite-crawling beanies.

Now baby leaves can be seen unfurling even through the curls of Kana’s hair.

Movement proves more difficult by the day. The slightest shift in position feels stiff, grating, restricted, like you are velcroed to the bark of the tree. Perhaps in another version of your life — where you were never anointed by cherry blood or trained under an enlightened arborist — you would feel afraid. In this life, however, you do not fear transformation. Change is the echoing hymn of Nature’s holy cathedral. Gautama Buddha’s tree did not stop growing while he sat beneath it — and who could say whether he would have reached enlightenment otherwise.

You are increasingly content with stillness. Sometimes, cycling to campus, a strange notion would arrest your mind, rewiring its perception of the wind-rush and motion-blur: maybe you weren’t moving at all. Instead, maybe you and your bike remained stationary against a rapidly moving world.

That is a tree’s experience.

The world, to these woods, must be a carnival of impatience. Human beings chase change in obnoxious, noisy clamors, unable to appreciate the process. A fine wine is not aged overnight. A sequoia takes many years to tower.

Dr. Miyazawa, Kana says, are we really making a difference with this?

We are the difference, Naoki says.

His irises have dragon-scaled and gone a lighter brown. The nervous construction workers avoid meeting those acorn-cap eyes, instead passing time with card games in the shelter of their idle bulldozers. They whisper rumors about the boss. His frustration, his imminence. You wonder whether your eyes have changed, too. Perhaps they have flushed a brilliant green, better to process the sunlight.

You always did want green eyes.

V. Tree

You and your tree have blurred together beyond delineation. You meld, your spine held straight against the trunk, your stretchmarks like splits in the bark.

Fucking hell….

Spurred by the threat of their boss, the workers finally gather enough courage to end your protest with bolt cutters and old-fashioned force. Now those tools are rendered useless. The trees consume your chains into their wood, hiding half the links, and you may be beyond separating, even by the burliest of builders.

We gotta report this, a worker mumbles on their retreat.

His buddy asks, How? I mean, what are we even looking at?

The buds on Kana’s face have bloomed into clusters of delicate flowers. She is blushed by the pink promise of cherries, and she smiles at the memory of them.

Naoki faces the waiting deforestation equipment head-on, without fear, as he has since day one.

His beard is lichen, leaves, and pine needles. His sage hair knits itself across the trunk of the tree, whose bark has become indistinguishable from his tanned, roughened skin. He has grown into an arboreal king. A lifetime of research and fieldwork and advocacy and love-spreading have culminated triumphantly into this moment.

You are proud to stand alongside him.

You put down roots. So many people fear what may happen if they choose the wrong plot of earth, if their roots are ripped up, if they drive miles deep only to find no water. They never consider that threats may come from elsewhere, anywhere. That the true test of where to settle isn’t place, but people, for no tree grows in true solitude.

Can you hear it? you ask the others. The music.

It’s the forest, Naoki whispers.

A thousand lives entwine through your toes, each humming its unique note of the symphony. Trees, grasses, trees, flowers, trees, mushrooms, you.

VI. Forest

You can no longer find your voice. It’s arrested in your throat like the knot of a lost tree limb, but phantom pain sings a song inside you. Your whole being is flush with forest sound. Like an infant struggling to mimic her mother’s words, you desperately reach for how to join it.

Kana has learned. She shares a memory with you through the soil:

An old oak tree grew in your grandparents’ backyard. It begged to be climbed and worn smooth by the hands and feet of laughing children –– by you and Kana. You made that tree your vertical kingdom. You discovered so much about life and the world on those visits. The walking gaits of every beetle, the leaf-eating pattern of every caterpillar, the nesting methods of every common bird. Kana would let her curls bounce downward, hanging from her knees on a dare. You once dozed off with your arms and legs hanging jaguar-like from the largest bough.

Then your grandfather cut every branch in your reach.

I don’t want you kids falling, he’d said, with your grandmother nodding behind him.

The oak tree lost its beautiful shape, and you lost your backyard escape. The adults never seemed to worry about the concrete playground that broke one classmate’s wrist and another classmate’s collarbone; those falls were facilitated by human engineering, after all. They were safe, regulation-approved accidents.

You never fell from the oak. Not once. On the contrary — it always seemed to catch you, somehow, as bending and yielding as it was firm and reliable. You trusted that tree more than any metal monkey bars. If your grandfather had not mutilated that oak, perhaps you and Kana never would have run to these woods.

Without words, Kana tells you, Their boss is coming. The one who wants this forest gone.

The workers have whispered this, too. Boss is coming to see about this issue for himself. The “issue” being you: your leaf-haloed head, your heart pumping slowly against the pressure of sap. You swear you can feel his polished footsteps beating against the earth. A warning breathes off the trees around you, trembling through your fused vertebrae.

Still, you stay serene.

He will see, you think, and this thought ripples outward into the sylvan hearts of your companions. He will see that there is no difference between us and this forest. He will say, No more.

VII. Clear Cut

You dream with chlorophyllic vividity. Sunlight fills the pores of your branching body, and fresh air exhales off you like an irresistible pheromone, drawing tiny insects whose legs tickle your face. Naoki’s wisdom flows freely amongst the group. So, too, does the love between Kana and her partner. Each of you has a heart-slice to share: wonder, humor, hope, solace.

You wake out of this near-religious haze, into a borderline-human consciousness that outlines the form of an approaching man.

He wears a suit. Suit. What a strange word; you almost couldn’t recall it.

The boss approaches Naoki first.

He studies the barkened bridge of his nose amid the foliage. Then Kana. He studies her blossom-bright cheeks. Then Kana’s partner. He looks over the gnarled wooden peace sign they chose as their final human message.

Protester by protester, the boss absorbs every detail of how people overlap with plants, how there is no longer — never was — any distinction between cutting wood or cutting flesh. He tests this discovery by gently caressing the mossy overhang of a man’s once-beard and the vibrant yellow shelf fungus adorning a woman’s once-throat. Sap or blood or cherry juice — every bruise aches the same, he sees.

Finally, you.

The boss stands before you, observing your shape in the trunk: lichened legs and twig-quilled arms. Human sight is blurring inward. Soon, you will have only the trance language of trees for vision. For now, though, you alone are still able to meet the man’s gaze. You offer a blink, like the Buddha offered his flower.

And hollowness bores into your core.

You see the end stages of heart-rot in his eyes. The point where a tree is no longer alive, but a shell of itself, a façade, a zombie. The boss smiles at you. He raises his radio.

Looks to me, he says, like we’re all clear.

Chainsaws rev to life in the near distance, and diesel chokes death through the forest.