Our Forests

Éloquence lacking in face of emotion. Yesterday I went to my BC Catethedral: Cathedral Grove here on Vancouver Island. A beautiful sunny day. Sun streaming in, blue sky above. Instead of rejoicing I held and am holding back tears as I write this. I have lived near this Cathedral most of my life. A place that it used to be rare to see any sky through the towering trees. A place where the forest floor was covered in the green that only those plants that could live with little sun survived. Yesterday beautiful trillium bloomed but the ferns are brown from drying out in their exposure. The sky was openly above me and bright blue. I hold back tears for the giant trees that have stood for hundreds of years reaching towards the heavens above that lay toppled on the ground. This is no accident from renovations. This has been done because there is no buffer to protect any more. And no amount of money will ever restore it. It is gone forever. There is no rebuild because no matter what grows now can withstand hundreds of years of what we will do around it. I was saddened to not see the trees that it used to take at least six people to link arms around. Ironic that is is old growth trees that held the ceiling of another cathedral that were lost in fire this last week. They cannot be replaced but can bebuilt. My heart hurts.