Today I gave a tour to a group of vision impaired folks; they crowded into the program theatre with dogs and canes and dark glasses and I taught them about the cottonwood forest. I told them about the trees of our river valley, the amazing geographical anomaly that happens around Lethbridge where balsam, plains, and narrow-leafed cottonwoods meet (like nowhere else in the world) and hybridize to create unique and individual leaf shapes. We ran our fingers around the edges of impressions of these three leaf shapes, the ridges and oblong patterns denoting the various species.
I showed them the bark, furrowed and rough, fingers in the creases, we imagined our hands as creatures making our homes in the outer folds of the tree; we touched the chewed roadways of barkbeetles, calligraphy scrawls on the inner wood of the tree, following their carved pathways with fingertips. I spoke about the lifecycle of the cottonwood trees; they time the release of their soft air-borne seeds for the season of the floods in the rivervalley. As the snow-like seeds land in the muddy floodplain, they find the perfect conditions to root and begin to grow. I passed around a jar of these seeds so that everyone could feel the soft cotton and search for the tiny tree-potentials inside.
We walked slowly through the woods and stopped to listen for birds -- yellow warblers, balitmore orioles, american robins, northern flickers. We listened to their calls and I conducted a symphony of bird mimicry. I described the birds by colour and shape and weight and traced the size of each bird into the palm of everyones hand. Then we felt nests: the blanket-like, knotted woven strings and grass and twine of the oriole, circular weave of mud and grass of the robin, the hollowed out tree of the flicker, and the cottonseed and spiderweb lined nest of the warbler.
we went further into the woods, listened for the hum of insects, we felt honeycomb, smelling the sweet memory off our hands.
I became self-conscious of the emphasis I constantly place on my sense of sight -- even in conversational descriptions: we see, we look, we show. Then to experience the woods through texture and sound and smell heightened my awareness to rich sensory weave of the forest.
As I guided them back to the nature centre, I asked everyone to walk alone for a moment and to be very silent, listening and feeling the forest. When we got back to the building, we shared some of our descriptions of the experience; the wind moving through the silvery-green leaves was described as peaceful, as musical, and felt as if the whole forest was a set of lungs, breathing all together, capillary motion punctuated by the mystery of moving creatures in the canopy.
