it's a sunny lovely late winter early spring day, but i feel the morbidity, even while i make note of the tender tips of pale green pushing through the snowmelt softening dirt and see the crust of frozen waves crack and crumble into icebergs and float away. i'm reading the oak papers. i'm willing myself to the protection of the old oak on wooded island, younger than the honywood oak in the book, but an old soul, and close, just across the highway that cuts through the park like a buzzsaw. the oak in the book is 800 years old, standing alone in a grove of young pines and the giant footprints of fellow oaks felled for money after the landowner honywood who protected them died leaving the instruction that they were not to be killed. the writer finds refuge in the one oak left, and reminds me i can find the same across the park and the buzzing highway. he drinks in the sound of nature and the sound of nature's silence, where here there is the eternal background of noise foregrounding. i want to be in a place where i hear nature when i die, not the vapid drone of machines.