Summer escaped like a sigh, so quickly forgotten. For the start of the school year, a friend suggested I look higher and further. “We know it’s bad. Tell us where it’s going. So I perched. A high platform, downy or rufous-bellied woodpeckers (very rare, my ornithologist neighbor tells me), cardinals and tufted tits flirting with the canopy, the freshness of fragrant linden and oak, discovering a soothing horizon from my perch . It’s all about perspective. Still.
As a child, I climbed in the maple tree next to the house (my father had installed a ring and a chain there) and I hid there, spying on “the grown-ups” without their knowledge. I suddenly found them small.
I must have been a mourning dove in a previous incarnation, I can relate to them. They accompanied me all summer, my pretty doves and their melancholy song, hoo-ah hoohoo. Lamartine translated:
“My heart, weary of everything, even of hope,
Will no longer go and importune fate with her wishes;
Only lend me, valley of my childhood,
A one-day asylum to await death. »
I observed in the distance, the Pinnacle valley, like a reassuring nipple that would have existed long before #FreeTheNipple. I buried my childhood there.
Every time I came down from my perch, I caught the rumors of the world flying, of touching blessed by the Pope, of hockey players who gave their 110% in the jockstrap. I went up to take refuge up there, on my hidden platform. pit pit pit. Ah look, a branch of the lime tree has broken. I’ll have to call Monsieur Poirier, the mountain doctor.
A cabin in the trees
I pulled myself up, inspired by the story of the former French shepherd, Édouard Cortès, the author of By the strength of the trees. This father of four children, afflicted with acedia (a spiritual discouragement), what we would call burnout in more prosaic terms, nestled in an oak tree in the Périgord forest for three months, under the dome of a living chapel. He lived a whole spring in his forest yurt of wood and glass to get away from the world, find peace and turn the page on a failure. While reading Lamartine and Rimbaud, he was observed by the local fauna: “They look at me like a bird in an aviary or a marmoset at the zoo. I am their funny bird. »
His children and his wife came to visit him on Sundays, like a convalescent. Better than antidepressants, this primitive bath of shinrin yoku, which doctors can prescribe if necessary, revived him, re-enchanted him. The sap started flowing again. “So that the sap of life flows through us, learn to remain like the tree. ” Motionless. It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve read this summer from up there, the most poetic and the most invigorating in any case.
Hey, I was thinking that if my colleague Jean-François who cracked a tweet on the veil on vacation at the beach had By the strength of the trees in the hands, it would have settled for digital minimalism. It’s like the bra: yes, it’s perhaps more feminist to take it off (and it’s not a religious sign), but as women, “we don’t give a damn boobs of your opinion.
By adoring so much what is but does not count, we end up not knowing anything about what counts but cannot be seen
My French lover, very “admiring” of the spectators who flashed their breasts on a very large screen at the Rammstein show on Sunday evening at Parc Jean-Drapeau, taught me the word “tchoutches” (breasts). Mind your choutches.
It is better to surf the sea which contains all the answers: everything is only waves and invariably, what goes up comes down.
Édouard Cortès, disgusted with us, did a men’s fast, a digital suicide and a sylvatic cure at 0 ng/m3 of arsenic. Saving.
“My cabin is an outpost on the beauty of the world. “A world that has lost 80% of its insects in 30 years (in Europe), and a third of its birds in 15 years (in France), he recalls for the benefit of his readers and the mourning doves who still coo .
A philosopher from the heights
Cortès is a naturalist philosopher and an adventurer, long before being an inevitably disappointed idealist Robinson. “When misfortune comes from big things, look for happiness in small things. If sorrow arises, before casting it away, let it teach what true joy is. »
There is no doubt that this writer also aims for a truly happy sobriety, like that of the gardener philosopher Pierre Rabhi. He hopes to own nothing that owns him. “Even a volunteer, I don’t know of anything more complicated to achieve than true simplicity. »
While drinking his oak coffee, or picking wild plants (oak shoots, beech, lime, hawthorn) for his salad, the man of the woods recommends plants rather than “digital”, unplugging to better plug in in itself. Foresting in this way brings us back to the sky-essence, the lost paradise of wild Friday. “There are so many cathedrals in the forest. To cut down trees is to knock down skies within us. »
I miss the times when the sap of the world The water of the river, the pink blood of green trees In the veins of Pan put a universe
Cortes rediscovers the fury of living thanks to the trees, the insects, the animals which accept him among them. And between Spain and France which were on fire this summer, I read it: “Nothing is more incendiary than a man without sacred fire. When hearts get cold, the earth heats up and burns. […] The more we are removed from nature, the more our nature becomes foreign to us. »
The program proposed by Québec solidaire (the very people who have denounced the Horne foundry in Rouyn since 2019) intends to democratize access to forests and establish “a right to nature”, free national parks, public transport to get there. render, Scandinavian style.
But it is certainly less profitable than giving a “right to pollute” to companies that see nature as a vast department store from which to draw endlessly while lowering the intelligence quotient of future voters, one of the side effects of arsenic.
As for the Minister of the Environment, Benoit Charette, he seems to really want to change air or era, but he will have to “continue”. In two days, he will be “in” the campaign if not “at home”. Poor wretch.
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