If trees could speak

How do we tell stories of humanity and nature at a time when our planet is burning? Novelist Elif Shafak invites us to listen to the trees, whose experience of time, stillness and impermanence is utterly different from our own. "Hidden inside [their] story is the past and the future of humanity," she says.

Humans do not see trees.

They walk by us every day.

They sit and sleep, smoke and picnic

and secretly kiss in our shade.

They pluck our leaves
and gorge on our fruits.

They break our branches

or carve their lover's name
on our trunks with their blades

and vow eternal love.

They weave necklaces out of our needles

and paint our flowers into art.

They split us into logs
to heat their homes,

and sometimes they chop us down

just because they think
we obstruct their view.

They make cradles, wine corks,
chewing gum, rustic furniture

and produce the most
beautiful music out of us.

And they turn us into books

in which they bury themselves
on cold winter nights.

They use our wood to manufacture coffins
in which they end their lives.

And they even compose
the most romantic poems for us,

claiming we're the link
between earth and sky.

And yet, they do not see us.

So one of the many beauties
of the art of storytelling

is to imagine yourself
inside someone else's voice.

But as writers, as much as
we love stories and words,

I believe we must also
be interested in silences:

the things we cannot talk
about easily in our societies,

the marginalized, the disempowered.

In that sense, literature can,
and hopefully does,

bring the periphery to the center,

make the invisible a bit more visible,

make the unheard a bit more heard,

and empathy and understanding speak louder
than demagoguery and apathy.

Stories bring us together.

Untold stories and entrenched
silences keep us apart.

But how to tell the stories
of humanity and nature

at a time when our planet is burning

and there is no precedent

for what we're about
to experience collectively

whether it's political,
social or ecological?

But tell we must

because if there's one thing

that is destroying our world
more than anything,

it is numbness.

When people become disconnected,
desensitized, indifferent,

when they stop listening,
when they stop learning

and when they stop caring

about what's happening
here, there and everywhere.

We measure time differently,
trees and humans.

Human time is linear --

a neat continuum

stretching from a past
that is deemed to be over and done with

towards the future that is supposed
to be pristine, untouched.

Tree time is circular.

Both the past and the future
breathe within the present moment.

And the present does not move
in one direction.

Instead it draws circles within circles,

like the rings you would find
when you cut us down.

Next time you walk by a tree,
try to slow down and listen

because each of us whispers in the wind.

Look at us.

We're older than you and your kind.

Listen to what we have to tell,

because hidden inside our story
is the past and the future of humanity.