Trees: Killing and the Custodians of Memory

Terence Stone

A few days ago I was with a group of friends talking about trees. One of my friends returned from a year in Australia last summer. She recounted her visit to a Boab tree, called The Prison Baob, in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, near the isolated town of Derby.

 Prison Baob, Nr. Derby, Western Australia

Hollow and over fourteen metres in circumference, it was fitted with a door and used as a prison for Aboriginal prisoners by the British, before they were walked to Derby for sentencing. The Baob has always had deep cultural significance—we might use the word sacred—for the Aboriginal people. We can’t begin to understand how horrifying this might have been for the prisoners and the tree—for another friend listening to the story declared, “Trees don’t like things like that”. For me this declaration was a validation of a troubling secret I’ve held since Cambodia when I found myself face to face with the Killing Tree at Boeung Choeung Ek, within a month or two of my friend’s visit to the Prison Baob in Australia. Here is my story:

I look at trees differently now, ever since Nancy, my wife, and I visited the killing fields of Cambodia. They have a life beyond the visibly statuesque form they take--immobile. Something about each one is different. It takes a special kind of attention to see that we all can recover from the numbness of conditioned alienation. It takes willingness, stillness and time. Trees talk; I'm now sure they weep; and they are certainly the custodians of memory.

Ever since our visit to the killing fields of Boeung Choeung Ek ("Crow's Feet Pond"), fifteen kilometres to the south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I've been haunted. In the months since then I haven’t been able to shake the immanence of the killing tree against which thousands of children were slaughtered. At random moments and in fragments of dreams like shards of bone I find myself with images and thoughts of the children who died there—their last moments: the last thing their eyes saw, or ears heard, a split second before the obliteration of consciousness—and now feel increasingly compelled to know more about the killing tree itself.

 The Killing Tree

For example, I discovered that the killing tree was called the chankiri tree. At first I understood this to be Khmer for "killing", but could find no translation that would confirm it. Cumulative hours of web searching revealed little else until I came upon a reference to the chankiri tree as a cottonwood tree, common to the tropics. Somewhere else, shockingly, I found that the chankiri tree is also known as “The Tree of Life”. Since accumulating these fragments of information, I continue to search for other references that might confirm or refute my findings, but have found nothing. Why, I thought, has this become such an obsession?

More than two thousand children were brought from Tuol Sleng by truck with a parent or parents, to arrive as the last of daylight died in the west. There they were torn from the last pair of arms that would ever cling to protect them and were delivered to their executioner, a young Khmer Rouge soldier, who took each by the legs and formally laughed to demonstrate being devoid of compassion or mercy as he swung the child’s head against the trunk of the tree. I’m sure it was over quickly for most, but if it wasn’t, then the executioner would swing and laugh again until the trembling or convulsing form demonstrated appropriate obedience to this terminal law of Angkor.

Baby At Tuol Sleng Before Being Taken For Execution Against The Killing Tree:

A Visitor At Tuol Sleng Leaves A Temple Flower In Memory

The day we walked the path through Boeung Choeung Ek children were singing in a nearby school. Their sweet voices enchanting the loops and harmonies of a beautiful Khmer melody that drifted over this place of cruelty and death. I had not yet come upon the tree. When I did, I read the sign that children were beaten at the tree, but didn’t take in fully what this meant. What I did feel was a compulsion to lay my hand upon the tree and find some kind of pulse—to feel something witnessed by this tree—the only living thing retaining the memory in some form of what exactly happened to each of the children brought here. My hand inexplicably lingered; something was being communicated and I felt death palpable. Nearby, in lyrical defiance of the past, the children still sang.

It was only after stepping away and I read the information sheet that was provided on entry to the site that I understood the grisly details of the method of execution. I was horrified to realize that the very place where I laid my hand would have been the exact place of impact of the children’s heads.

The Children Have Been Playing

Numbly, I tried to take in what had happened in the square metre of ground on which I had stood and to which I now returned. The children still sang golden notes that drifted over the undulating field and through the branches of the trees, and I could neither separate nor put the two experiences together I stared at the place where my hand had rested, expecting that it would surrender some knowledge, but nothing more came to me. My eyes drifted down to the roots at the right of the tree where six bricks were arranged at right angles to each other against the trunk; a termite hill was forming over them from which a string of prayer beads hung; articles of children’s clothing seemed to be emerging from the soil; a rose had been placed in the arrangement; a drinking straw protruded from one of the soil encrusted bricks; a candy wrapper and various leaves were set around. The bricks reminded me of the torture wing and first cell block of Tuol Sleng. After this initial shock of recognition, I remembered how the Jewish children of Auschwitz had drawn butterflies and enchanted forests in order to escape the horror of their fate before they too were slaughtered. I looked down again at the base of the tree and thought, “The children have been playing”; and nearby still the children sang.

I now think that all this has since been the measure of my obsession about the tree. I remember the thousands of photographs we’d seen earlier that day of the prisoners at Tuol Sleng. Few of them were of children unless they were sitting beside mothers as they had their mug shots taken, holding name and number in front. In some of the photographs, the children were mere infants in their mothers’ arms. What were missing were their names—all of them denied even basic identity as each truckload of the condemned brought each of these invisible children closer to obscene sacrifice and perhaps some perverse mercy against the trunk of the killing tree—and the children at the nearby school still sang.

At the very least I want to know the names of the children who were broken on this tree. I want to read each name out loud. I want to struggle with the pronunciations and repeat each name exactly as it was uttered by a loving mother who smiled at her infant for the first time she took it to her breast. This has been my obsession—Naming! But because this is impossible, I turn to the killing tree which still stands and holds an essential part of each child in its memory. It is the only thing that can be known: Chankiri tree; family of the great tropical cottonwood; "Tree of Life" that refuses to give up the spirit of each child that was broken against it and whose blood fed the soil in which it stands year after year after year—and where Khmer children nearby still sing hauntingly beautiful melodies.

The hope for this wounded country is that the children who were singing will grow in safety and hope; but at the time and since I stood with the Chankiri tree, a curious mystery lingered. The tree’s trunk intimately shared the trauma of the children over thirty years ago; and yet the trunk seems to have added little by way of growth. Is it possible, I wonder, that the tree, in sympathy with those infant victims resists growth, and in memory of those whose slaughter it witnessed, refuses to die?

Avatar Grove: The Future

Terence Stone


Standing here at the bottom of the valley in Avatar Grove, I recall the apprehension of destruction, followed by uncertain reprieve after logging was prevented many years ago in 2010. Still officially unprotected, in 2019 the loggers came back for the final few percent of valley old-growth when the catchy invocation of Avatar as a tourist draw had faded; when few asked anymore, “Why was the grove called Avatar?” Yes. Use of the past-tense already foreshadowed its destruction.

Redcedar, Avatar Grove, Port Renfrew, Vancouver Island

That morning the loggers finally came with chain saws, skidders, loaders and trucks. Destruction seemed all but accomplished with a little effort. It was only a question of shifting trees to the stumpage side of the ledger along with calculated profit. But then, as if materializing out of the morning mist, mothers and fathers, along with a few elderly people, began to appear, advancing from all directions, winding their way between the trees. Each couple or single parent carried a bundle.

The Magic of Avatar Grove

A logger cried out from the logging road; and then another shout, a more urgent riccochet amongst the trees, from one who advanced quickly to see what was happening. I didn’t see him until he was on the edge of the ravine, casting about with bewildered eyes at the advance of the interlopers walking toward a prominent, gnarled Redcedar—two thousand years of life. An engine revved angrily, impatiently from the road as the logger crashed back the way he came, surrounded by the shadows of his own muttered profanities. Other loggers stood or sat in curiosity as the gathering closed into a circle.

Eventually, the engines sputtered and silence descended. It was still early--the mist persisted in luminous pools between the trees and ethereal wisps curled from the lower branches of a scattered stand of Hemlock. Deeper across the ravine where I stood and watched from an obscure vantage point, the mist remained heavy.

The gathering around the old Redcedar was about fifty adults and twenty children. All, even the children who looked about in awe, remained silent. Entering the grove had imparted to them the soft tread of the deer or cougar. Without consciousness, ego had dropped away and they became more and more indistinguishable from the life of the grove. I was curious about the bundles—thirty maybe—until an infant cried. It wasn’t distress, you’ll understand. A father gently handed a bundle to his wife and she set about feeding the little one where she stood. Then I understood that all the bundles were infants.

A elderly woman’s voice was raised from some meditative place and dispensed like manna to the gathering:

“I don’t need to thank anyone for being here. We share a single purpose. We’re not here to save the trees as warriors—no spiking or language of battle will be uttered amongst us, because this is for our children. Today in particular, it’s for our babies”.

A man amongst them softly cried. Someone touched his arm.

The woman smiled at him and continued: “I don’t know when it happened, but this great emptiness we’re always trying to fill is a hollowness of souls; how many generations, I don’t know. Along the way we gave up the rituals of community with all this”, she slowly cast about the forest with reverence held aloft in her upturned hand. “Today we give, and take it back—reciprocal you see—until even the givin’ and takin’s just one thing—a circle, maybe; or a globe—just like the earth to which we all belong. It don’t matter what your religion is, or none; walk into the grove and attend to your babies. Listen carefully—in here;” she touched her breastbone, “and only stop when your infant’s heart tells you that you’ve arrived. There’ll be someone to help if you need it.”

The group members turned about them in silence; each couple or individual seemed to be looking, listening, feeling—scanning with their entire being. Piecemeal, some were drawn away with certainty, others more cautiously; but the purposefulness of ego was completely absent. I’d seen many people come and go through the years—heads and mouths too busy to know the grove with anything more than a fleeting sense or two at any one time.

I’d often see them look back as they left the grove with grief etched in their faces, as if they’d left something indefinable there, or knowing that they’d failed to see the sublime—and they had. But the grief—ahhh! That was another thing. For most, it was a grief for something they’d never had--had not even been born with the vision to see; like creatures deep underground whose distant ancestors were deprived of light for so long that their eyes were filmed with membrane and then eventually dissolved.

But all this was different. All of the dispersing members were here with mindful intent, stripped of desperate, grasping desire. A little girl, perhaps nine-years of age, stepped ahead of her uncertain mother, holding her hand; she looked back and smiled, “This way, mamma. I see it!” Her mother followed.

I looked about the grove in which I’d spent so much time and harvesting as much wisdom as I needed to know this place as part of myself. There are such things as auras you know. All the trees and shrubs in their health emit a verdant green luminescence. There were changes here today, for many of the trees emitted a golden aura that breathed and wreathed spirals around their trunks and into their branches. This is what the little girl had seen as she brought her mother to the base of an old Douglas Fir. The mother attended to the tree and then to the infant in her arms. She smiled and knew her infant’s heart.

Two of the elderly with their account of many years had found trees that called them and invited them to lay amongst the roots to which they would soon enough return.

By now all had arrived at the trees with golden auras, each held an invisible signature that signalled a sisterhood or brotherhood to the infants or elderly who were called. Some of the mothers and fathers had already slung ropes over low branches and were hanging their swaddled infants like cocoons from rope slings. Some of the men moved quickly to assist parents throw a loop of rope over trees with higher branches. One of the loggers up on the hill understood something he could not yet explain and quickly followed the urge to assist. With bright eyes he arrived to help a young mother standing beneath a gigantic Redcedar with the first broken branch twenty feet above her. Within seconds he had looped the rope and secured her infant.

Barely a whisper was heard until the elder who had brought all together raised her face to the sky, flung out her arms in supplication, smiled and declared, “It will rain, the wind will come, and there will be song”. A sudden gust broke into and murmured diffusely through the grove. The loggers up near the road turned and left, save one who squatted with his chainsaw, emanating a black aura. His eyes were as narrow as his vision, for he saw nothing except stolen pay.

The first gust of wind was followed by a gale that barely penetrated the forest floor, but set the canopy two hundred feet above thrashing in excitement. Such was the power of the wind that even the sturdiest trees transmitted movement to the forest floor so that each of the swaddled infants began to rock. The golden aura seemed to take power and movement from the wind and all those present emanated a white aura that wove a tapestry amongst the gold. The infants glowed silver; and song could be heard through membranes of skin and bark. Mothers and fathers joined the song with voices that issued untutored from open hearts; and then came the misty rain that blessed upturned faces and the soil of the earth. Not an infant cried.

Two hours later the wind and rain ceased. The infants were lifted from their trees and all gathered around the elder: “Your babies—all of you—are forever one with this grove. Treasure it as your earth family. For now the grove is safe".

In the ten years that followed I watched from my usual place across the ravine the infants and then the children return. Green, gold, silver and white enchanted the grove whenever a single visitor from that sacred day returned.

Crises that I don’t understand happened outside the grove that saw its abandonment by all but the special ones whose home it remained; but it was enough. One morning I heard engines from the roadway. The loggers were back to trade old growth for a desperate dependency on economic growth. Then the chainsaws were in the grove. I watched as the teeth tore into a eighteen-hundred year old Redcedar, obliterating the record of its age at a rate of one hundred years per minute. The luminescence of green aura disappeared faster than the trees fell. Somewhere beyond hearing I could sense children screaming in visceral sympathy before I felt the teeth of the saw at my base.

Now I lie here at a terminal age of fourteen hundred years, unable to see across the ravine as I did for my entire life; but I can see a black aura wreathing across the forest floor and amongst the broken branches. The children wander aimlessly nearby and add their dark sorrow to the weave of inconsolable lament. A dispirited sky spreads a grey shroud of clouds across the valley floor.


Tomorrow morning at first light, from beneath shadowed mists, the hauling begins.

"Wah-ulu in the Mara Tree": A Poem of Enlightenment

Terence Stone

The Sooriya (Sooriya or sun in Sinhala; Suraj or sun in Hindi) Mara is the name for the Sri Lankan Rosewood. It literally translates as Sun Mara, but no mythology is available online. If Mara refers to the God of Death, then Sun Mara juxtaposes the light and dark of the life and death aspects of being. Interesting. If anyone can provide any additional information, please comment.

Sooriya Mara tree with bats at a distance

I've thought from time to time about the shock in first seeing hundreds of wah-ulu, huge fruit bats, hanging above our heads from a gigantic spreading Sooriya Mara tree while on a walk near Tissamaharama in Southern Sri Lanka. During the late afternoon, occasionally one would drop away and lazily lift above the canopy on a 3-4 foot wingspan, returning after a brief circuit to settle in the shade. It was eerie and caught the edges of dark fantasies, as if fragments of nightmare encroached on the waking day.

Sooriya Mara tree with bats close up

Steeped in Buddhism, as we were in Sri Lanka, the relationship between these nightmare fragments and the Buddha’s great contest with Mara, the God of Death beneath the Bodhi Tree further intensified the images for me; so I decided to write a poem about the experience, the result of which follows. I put this poem out there on a dark wing beneath the silver light of October’s poya (full) moon just before Halloween.

Wah-ulu and the Mara Tree

Wah-ulu, wah-ulu, in the mara tree,
Your daylight song is silence deep;
Stretch lazy, loosely leathered wings
From black-fruited bodies, grave.
One drops away and tears the air
In scything flight to leave the shade
And slowly test the waning sun.
Wah-ulu’s time is drawing near

Wah-ulu, wah-ulu, in the mara tree,
When ripened night falls, slip away;
Shape-shifting nightmare’s foul decay
Of rotting flesh--distorted fantasy!
Your triumphant screech distends the dark
Before the rising moon reveals how stark
Wild hunger drools the thirsty earth.
Wah-ulu’s time has come at last!

Wah-ulu, wah-ulu, in the mara tree,
The light returns and there I see
Your shadow-shape’s gross gluttony.
Whose blood was draw by you last night?
Which soul was tortured in delight?
What bilious seeds were sown in flight
As gifts from darkness unto light?
Wah-ulu’s death will always be
Defended by the mara tree.

Tree Huggers Beheaded: Radical Environmentalists

Terence Stone

Would you offer your head to save a tree? Extreme as it may seem, this is precisely what happened in the village of Khejadli, less than an hour’s ride from Jodhpur in Rajasthan, India. On our recent trip there my partner, Nancy, and I journeyed over the rough terrain of the Thar Desert to Khejadli whose history is little known in the rest of the world, but whose influence pervades environmental movements everywhere, whether you know it or not. Our journey took us back through time as we passed little hamlets of round huts with intricately woven roofs. Eventually we arrived at one of these immaculate round houses where healthy children and adults made us welcome and we heard the story of a courageous woman, Amrita Devi, and of the massacre that her sacrifice initiated.

The people of whom I speak are known as Bishnoi, from the Hindu bish or the number 20, and noi or the number 9, identifying them as people of the 29 tenets of religious faith by which they live. Bishnoism was founded in the late Fifteenth Century by Guru Jambheshwar. Four groups of tenets within the twenty nine cover personal hygiene, healthy social conduct, worship of God, and the preservation of biodiversity. In the latter group, two stand out as observable in the life surrounding every home and hamlet: be compassionate to all living beings; and do not cut green trees.

In 1730, by order of the Maharajah of Mawar in Jodhpur who required wood to burn in the building of his palace, a royal party under the leadership of Hakim set off into traditional Bishnoi territory to harvest the Khejri tree from which the village name was derived. On arriving, Amrita Devi stopped the party and told them they were forbidden from cutting the trees. Hakim laughed, but suggested a bribe might save the trees. Amrita refused on the basis that it would be shameful to engage in such a transaction. Hakim and his party then went to set about their work; but undeterred, Amrita blocked their way and offered herself in sacrifice to stop them: “If one tree is saved”, she said, “even at the cost of one’s head, it is worth it”. Hakim wasted no time with such impudence and beheaded her, witnessed by Amrita’s three young daughters.

Depiction of the massacre

Asu, Ratni, and Bhagu, perhaps inspired by the sacrifice of their mother then offered their own heads to save the trees. With little hesitation, Hakim and the royal party promptly beheaded them. Despite this terrible cost, the royal party proceeded to cut down the trees. In response, the elderly women and men of the village each went to a tree to hug it in protection, all to no avail. The cutters beheaded each of them before chopping down the tree which had been held for protection.

Hakim laughed and taunted the villagers that they were merely offering their elderly who were of no value. It was then that other villagers stepped forward—men, women, newlyweds, young people, and children--voluntarily took up the protective role of each hugging a tree until the axe took them too. Meanwhile, messengers had been dispatched to summon people from 83 other Bishnoi villages. At some point, Hakim and the party realized they had been defeated by the mayhem and carnage that would have continued. They hurriedly left the scene, destroyed trees left where they had fallen as they hurried back to Jodhpur--363 beheaded villagers lay amongst the broken trees.

We cannot know the heart of the Maharajah; but in a public show of regret, he issued an edict that from that time forth, no wood or animals would ever be taken from Bishnoi lands. Since then the names of Amrita Devi and her daughters, Asu, Ratni, and Bhagu have been honoured as the very spirit of the Bishnoi faith in practice. The Bishnoi people to this day are fiercely protective of trees, animals and biodiversity. They live in harmony and remarkable health, working extremely marginal lands; and many other people across India have taken up environmental causes in the emulated spirit of the Bishnoi. And just as we cannot know the heart of the Maharajah, we cannot know the participation mystery and practical relationship the Bishnoi understand and viscerally feel in their relationship to the trees.

In an online interview I listened to a Bishnoi man speaking with passionate energy: "These trees are our lives! These trees they are our everything!" I think the Bishnoi know something we all ought to know. How do we get back to the garden?

The Chipko (From the Hindu “to cling to”) Andolan (Movement), had its first taproot in the Khejrali Massacre. In 1973 the Movement’s name rose to public prominence in the efforts of, primarily of women, activists who mobilized to halt the deforestation of the Himalayas. Since then the movement has spread across India. Always beginning with local women’s activism, but often joined by men. Now, just like the taproot of the Khejri tree the movement is deep and secure in the desert-like soul of industrial logging.

Women of the Chipko Andolan

So when you hear the term “Tree Huggers”, disparagingly, or as a term of approbation, remember that its origins came from courageous people across India who began their radical resistance 500 years ago on the formation of their faith and are more active today than our passionate, but small protests, here in Canada and the USA.

Bishnoi house: always immaculate

Before we left our Bishnoi hosts, I asked through our interpreter how they felt about the sacrifice that their ancestors made 300 years ago. The older man consulted with his family for a while and then said, his head hung, “We failed [to save those trees]”. Following our family visit, we spent time in silent reflection in the Khejrali garden memorial to the 363 martyrs, wandering amongst the 363 Khejri trees planted in memoriam.

Massacre memorial

Please assist in preventing logging of old growth forest on Cortez Island. Visit the Ancient Forest Alliance website and see the beauty that is at stake. We don't need to lose our heads over it; but your signature would be appreciated.  

Khejri Tree

Khejri tree

Known as the “Golden Tree” is also the state tree of Rajasthan, it prefers extremes of temperatures and can survive as an evergreen in the most arid of conditions. Propagation is by seeds in moister conditions, but mostly by sending out suckers. It root system goes down 30 metres, and so the tree does not compete for moisture with agriculture. In fact, its shade helps retain surface moisture for crops and is a valuable source of organic decomposition. The root system also stabilizes sandy soils and acts as a windbreak and shelter for humans, animals and crops, as well as being a nitrogen fixer.

The leaves and seedpods have a very high nutritive value, and so are a valuable source for animal fodder. The pods are sweet and prized for human consumption.

Medicinally this tree is a veritable pharmacopeia: The bark provides immediate relief for snake and scorpion bites; different parts of it are used in the treatment of asthma, leprosy, dysentery, bronchitis, tremors, nervous disorders, worm infections, many skin problems; the gum is highly nutritive and is used by pregnant women to ease delivery.

Chestnut Trees Inside My Infant Heart

Terence Stone

Woolton Woods, Liverpool, England

Woolton Woods At Sunset: Standing In Mystery

It was the walks on which my mother took me that first impressed me from 1944, the year of my birth--through the iron gates that swung on huge sandstone gateposts, into Woolton Woods; and then the soft crunch of wheels and slow feet along the red-gravel path that sounded like a lullaby. The gate; gateposts, red-gravel path--I’m not sure I actually knew them then, or if they naturally attached themselves to my first memories of trees before I had an ego that could separate things, out there in the world, from consciousness, here, in my sacred body.

I was vulnerable then--a tortoise without a shell. It didn’t matter though. Mom and two teenage girls who attached to me took care of everything. Too much sun, wind, rain and the concertina hood of the pram would be raised or lowered; the covers tucked around me along with a smile warmer than the blankets; or the flap on the waterproof coverlet would be raised and clipped in front of my face, blocking the lower third of the raised pram hood; but even at that, I always had an unobstructed view up toward the sky from where I lay supine.

Along that path the last or the first thing I always saw before or after closing my eyes was the canopy of chestnut trees that lined the walk: rich, green, oblong leaves dappled the sky. Still or moved by a breeze, leaf prints patterned my flesh and filled the spaces inside me. It must have been ripening autumn along the same path that the leafless chestnut trees laced the blue or cloud-grey canvass of the sky with the delicate embroidery of twigs and branches. In between the seasons of lush green and barrenness was the magic of falling leaves; but the lacing of the sky as my walks advanced toward winter was the most visceral image, for when I closed my eyes the lacing of branches and twigs stayed with me. My eyelids captured and held it all like butterflies in a net. I can rationalize it all now as the light of day casting shadows on my retina the capillary network in my eyelids; but of course this is objectifying it all from the perspective of a tortoise with its carapace fully formed. Reality itself was different then. The canopy of those chestnut trees were inseparable from me; egoless as I was, it all lived in me, providing beauty, strength and structure, while my innocent radiating energy passing beneath fed the trees no less than their necessity for water, light and minerals.

Leaves of the Horse Chestnut Tree

I’m convinced that culturally there is a primal missing link between infants and trees. For the past quarter century I’ve have the recurring image of swaddled infants hanging in trees like fruit--perhaps the fruit of the tree of life, evocative of Eden. Where on earth did the lullaby, “Rock-a-Bye-Baby”, come from? It’s a beautiful image until the bough breaks and baby falls. I wonder if this fall is the infants’ version of the Edenic Fall, when Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge and see themselves objectified for the first time. Just so, the baby’s ego-carapace forms and hardens, forever separating her from the trees, and leaving her lonely inside the illusory safety of the tortoise shell.

About ten years after I began having the images of fruited infants in trees, I came across the beautiful poem by Seamus Heaney, “From the Republic of Conscience”, and knew instantaneously that he and I shared the same images; but he had found a way back--a recovery of the missing link between infants and trees--ritual:

“Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning spells universal good

and parents hang swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.”

As I age, my carapace is softening. I imagine that if I live long enough and continue drawing wisdom from my errors, I’ll become vulnerable enough to find a way back into the canopy of those chestnut trees and live a cycle of seasons in a place from which, in a healthier relationship between humans and their environment, I never should have fallen. My hope is that you mothers, fathers, and grandparents take the time to hang swaddled infants in the tree of life from a bough that will not break in the bitter winds that continue to blow. Secure them until this long winter ends and spring arrives once more.

Trees and Temples: The Great Non-Duality

Terence Stone

Siem Reap, Cambodia

Tree Roots Over Entrance To Ta Prom

 

After reading the story of Nhiem Chun, a labourer, who in 1941 worked on the restoration of temples in Siem Reap, I was looking forward to visiting Ta Prohm, a temple still un-reclaimed from nature that he undertook to care for in loving custody from 1942 onward. He was interviewed by the BBC in 2006 for the Television series, Imagine: Who Cares About Art. After visiting most of the sites in the area, my interest grew deeper into Nhiem's “lives” (for he believed he may have been a builder of Ta Prohm in a previous incarnation) and those of these ancient buildings, like the roots and branches of aged trees slowly insinuating themselves into their histories—their nooks, crannies, and foundation fissures, through doorways and windows. What are the limits and responsibilities of preservation; and can it be carried too far with the technologies at hand and ill-considered motives that may blindly drive this project in Siem Reap?

Over a period of sixty-five years Nhiem Chun regularly turned up at Ta Prom to undertake the unpaid work of sweeping away the leaves that fell and blew around the temple as nature’s cycles dictated. I have no doubt the Buddhist principle of impermanence was never far from the mind of this holy man. How could it have been when, between 1975 and 1979, he was removed from his home and beloved temple by the Khmer Rouge into forced labour under their brutal regime? How could it have been when his two beloved sons were separated from him, only for him to discover after "liberation" that they were victims of extermination, their throats slit with sharpened sugar-palm fronds? How could impermanence have been far from Nhiem’s consciousness as he returned to the perpetual mundane task of sweeping the leaves and loving Ta Prohm as he had done for the previous thirty-three years through seasons unceasing?

Tree Roots Over Rear Entrance To Ta Prom

 

Sweeping…sweeping…sweeping the leaves with his grass broom and never once—although I’m sure it was within Nhiem’s power—attempting to cut out the roots or branches of invading trees from their natural proclivity to find places of sunlight, moisture, and food in and through the beautiful, ancient temple stonework of Ta Prohm. With what wisdom did he anoint his task to tidying the incredible beauty of the new life and slow decay he witnessed through the decades? The splitting of a wall; sticky buds of spring leaves bursting into rioting green; a fallen pillar; the fragrant, spiraling blooms of temple flowers opening in their own brief puja to the divinity of change; vines to grace and loosen lintels.



Someone with a keen eye for the art of nature also found Ta Prom and so it featured in the movie Tomb Raiders (2001); and with it the anonymity of Nhiem was broken. But the BBC discovered a story more important to be told than could ever be scripted in Hollywood; it was the dedication and humility of a pious aging man who I believe made no distinction between nature and manufactured art—it was all of a piece; no dualities. By the time of his interview he was tired and bent, but still about his daily sweeping. The following year he put aside his broom with the full knowledge of his own impermanence and the beauty of his own place in the cycle of time and died in 2009, aged 87, in the village of Rohal, near Siem Reap, watched over by his family.



A life like Nhiem’s has a way of encroaching on the lives of others lived distantly because all who have the will to reflect on the way he lived knows that what he took on as a life-purpose wasn’t pointless—it was filled with simple prayer and hope that eased aside the brutal project of the Khmer Rouge as surely as nature eased aside the gigantic accomplishments of Ta Prohm’s twelfth-Century masons. The loss of his own two sons, the land-mining of the temple sites by the Khmer Rouge, the brutality and destruction that reigned across Cambodia for a moment in history depresses; but Nhiem Chun’s life uplifts in its dedicated simplicity. It has the power to transform if one permits it to. I couldn’t visit Ta Prohm and other sites without seeing through a new pair of glasses what he may have seen; I was left with a deeper appreciation of things left undisturbed by the hubris apparent in the extent of restorations in progress to satisfy tourism-as-commodity.



Ta Prom is much as it was in 2007 when Nhiem was too frail to continue sweeping. Perhaps others understood his purpose, or are faced with the intuitive discomfort I felt in contemplating the “restoration” of this temple, which becomes more sacred with each new root that finds a home here. I know that Nhiem’s work is not forgotten; when we arrived for our visit we came upon the parody of about fifteen young people with the same grass brooms that Nhiem used; each of them standing around looking more bewildered than busy—fifteen young sweepers without the sense of purpose or the mentorship of Nhiem, that venerable old custodian. But if one of them could just listen carefully to the floors and walls of Ta Prom when the tourists depart for the day and the only sound is the whisper of fallen leaves, I’m sure his spirit will always be there to guide.



Certain edifices that naturally escaped nature’s powerful intrusions are evident and invite renovations at the level of manicure to that of moderate rebuilding—much of it to restore architectural features pillaged on behalf of people wealthy enough to buy history; perhaps the propping and securing of a leaning wall, or buttressing of a collapsing arch. But one hardly needs to spend much time to appreciate where nature has entered into an inseparable partnership with the beauty of a building. At Preah Khan it was nothing less than shocking to see an ancient tree at one with the stonework on which it had grown, and into which it had sent deeply its roots, felled ten feet up its trunk—left pale and dead like a corpse draped on a wall.

Tree Corpse At Preah Khan 

Other sites in which trees had become a part of the artisans' work were several. Near PhimeanakasTemple we saw stonework magnificently held in an embrace by a great tree. At the bridge of Spean Thma the stonework was beautifully draped and overgrown with tree roots. At Banteay Kder Temple, a gigantic tree foregrounds and dwarfs the structure. Ta Som Temple entrance is delicately arched and draped with sinuous roots. One hopes that as the work of reclamation and restoration continues, great consideration can be given to the legacy of Nhiem Chun and the artistic status of nature itself.

Nancy, My Partner, Holding Hands and Talking With A Tree Person (See It?)