It’s no wonder we can’t keep pace with forests or read the sign language of lichen. We are the toddlers of the universe, and we die children. Forever enamoured, impulsive, wounded, bewildered. We speak in decades and consider ourselves long-term planners. But the timetable of trees comes in units of millennia. It takes ages for a forest to grow, hours to burn, ages to bounce back. And it does, in time, bounce back. Insects feed on the deadwood. Birds feed on the insects. Wildlife grazes on saplings that emerge from the soil seedbank—they shit, fertilize, distribute seeds.
We fill our wheelbarrows with compost from the forest floor. Digging our palms in the decomposing heap of Afrocarpus falcatus leaves and Vitex keniensis twigs, we find swarms of termites digesting their death. We haul our mizigo all the way up to the nursery, where we’ll use the leaf litter as mulch. The corpses of today’s forest feed the saplings of next year’s. A little life, a little slaughter.
Death and birth cycles are the language of nature that our restoration team tries to protect. The Afromontane forests of Tigoni are only 22 years old. Before that, the land was dominated by a eucalyptus plantation and invasives like cypress, wattle, Solanum mauritianum, and Cestrum aculeastrum. The forests are still surrounded by a sea of tea plantations. We’re a couple of decades into restoration, and we will never see it complete. There isn’t enough deadwood. Invasives are still a problem. But as children of the earth, we can’t expect to see the final forest. All we can do is participate in the cycle, defend the cycle, keep it balanced, honour life and death, dealing neither too quickly.
Caeli Kean 