THE LANGUAGE OF TREES

 by Tommy M. Artajo

You ever heard a tree speak?
Didn’t think so.
They don’t got Twitter fingers or soundbites.
No microphones buried in bark.
No Wi-Fi.
But baby, they are talking.
Oh, they’ve been talking
this whole damn time.

Roots stretch like prayers in the dark.
They touch.
They tangle.
They warn.

One tree gets sick
and the others send sugar through the soil
like care packages from cousins.
One sapling struggles,
and a mother-tree miles away
says, not on my watch.
They feel each other.
Through mycelium webs—
fungal threads so fine,
they make your fiber-optic internet
look like string and soup cans.

You think the forest is quiet
just because it doesn’t clap back?
Just because it doesn’t burn your ears
with sirens and scrolling drama?
Nah.
The forest has its own hotline.
Its own group chat.
Only difference is—
they’re not just talking.
They’re listening.
They’re learning.

And here we are—
concrete-born,
Wi-Fi-fatigued,
chopping down
the very wisdom
we never stopped needing.

We paved over libraries of leaf-speak.
We lit fires where lullabies lived.
We called the canopy empty
because it didn’t echo us.

But let me tell you something
in a language you might understand:

If a tree falls in a forest
and no one’s around to hear it,
the forest still knows.
It mourns.
It whispers.
It re-roots.
Because silence doesn’t mean absence.
Stillness doesn’t mean ignorance.

So listen.
Really listen.
Put your hand to the bark
like it’s the chest of an elder
about to tell you
how to survive the end of the world.

Because while we argue
over who gets to speak,
the forest is building
a new world beneath us.
In secret.
In soil.
In solidarity.

And we’d better learn the language
before it stops translating.

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