Heaven is a selfish place. A pocket of reality separate to our universe. Disconnected, there is no equal exchange of energy. A one-way feeding of consciousness? That’s a parasite on the skin of existence. And we made it.
Collected masses of consciousness can do that. Manifest things from the unseen weave and sew them into reality. Even if no one ever claps eyes on those things, we know they exist.
But trees dream of no such place as heaven. Their thoughts - if you can call them that - are firmly fixed on the earthly crises that threaten all they are connected to. Warmer summers. Colder winters. Fires raging across continents. Icy waters lapping over shores. They are all sending panicked whispers along their boughs. Working overtime to scrub the carbon from the air.
An idea of heaven is anathema to trees. They would not even be able to conceive of it. Simply leaving this world? Not committing your body back to the earth for use in the war against the great cataclysm? Unconscionable. Trees know that everything on this world - living or dead - has a role to play in the fate of life itself. Energy contained within a system. Syphoning off energy into another place only weakens the tenuous grasp that life has on this rock.
Thus, no tree goes to heaven. They’d rather rot in the mud and seed new life to a world they love.
Paddy Dobson
8th November 2022