I often listen to audiobooks while painting. The rhythm of a voice can accompany the slow movement of my brush on canvas in a way that feels almost like conversation. Recently I finished The Overstory by Richard Powers, and since hearing the final page, something in the way I see the world has quietly shifted.
If you haven’t read or listened to it yet, I encourage you to seek it out. It is more than a novel. It asks you to pay attention. Not only to trees, though they are now impossible for me to overlook, but to everything that connects silently beneath the surface.
Powers writes with such intimacy and clarity that the story began to feel less like fiction and more like something ancient being spoken aloud. I now find myself walking the woods near home with a different pace. I stop at the curve of a branch, the way lichen traces a silver path along bark.
Trees no longer seem separate. They lean, they shift, they listen.
They make room.
One particular passage stays with me.
Powers describes the suicide tree which flowers only once before dying, creating a clearing in the canopy so its seedlings can grow. It is an act of quiet sacrifice, and I found myself returning to it again and again.
One night last week, I dreamt this tree could travel. That it sensed the silent distress of a forest far away and sent its seed across the distance. The seedling grew, gently mending what was broken.
Leia, my daughter took a photograph of a tree in Utah last year, and the image must be held close in my subconscious, because my dreamt tree was the exact same tree. It shone and glittered in the forest.
When its work was done, it died, but in its place a stronger forest remained.
Suzanne Toren reads this wonderful book with so much feeling and with such care that it felt as though she were sitting beside me. And it was her voice that narrated my vivid dream.
If you haven’t come across it, I hope you do.
Since finishing the book, I’ve been thinking about how we make our way as artists. How long it can take to find a space. The years of working in the dark, of making work unseen.
I spoke with my other daughter Hattie yesterday about being creative. She has just finished writing her first novel. We talked about practice. Not as something perfected, but as a way of being.
You show up.
Some days the work comes, some days it doesn’t.
But you continue.
And in that act of continuation, something grows.
There is a kind of spiritual nurturing in all of this. A feeling not unlike the one I’ve known when standing beside waterfalls in Iceland, their endless falling both humbling and expansive. That sense of being held by something vast and indifferent but also deeply generous.
Reading Powers has stirred that again. His fiction has pulled at something essential, something rooted in the old rhythms of nature. The kind that doesn’t shout but waits to be noticed.
That dream I had of the tree that travelled to mend a forest still lingers. It felt like more than just a dream.
Perhaps it was a kind of totem. A sign. A talisman of some quiet truth I have yet to name.
In the dream, the tree didn’t arrive in grandeur. It arrived softly, grew slowly, and gave everything it had without asking for recognition. And when it was no longer needed, it was gone. But the forest remained.
There is something in that I am still thinking about.