A Wound's Way of Wandering

The banging becomes a part of my headspace dream before it wakes me.

The rap tap tap of a woodpecker’s beak probing the garden oak tree. In my?dream-focused eye I’m in my childhood home peering down from the porch at a rotten oak, seeing the woodpecker ferret out and eat grubs plucked from the white rot inoculated wood.?

As I awake, clear dream vision becomes blurry-eyed reality and my wonder is now on the?dead dream tree's wounds:? is it maybe, more alive now, full of beak burnishes, teeming with grubs and threads of fungi??Seemingly?full of such plentiful life, a plethora of food to share.??

Thump, thump as I rub my eyes.?The dream is now dissolving away like snow on a hot stone and I’m out of bed, groggily peering through the window at a vibrant oak tree hosting a horde of various animals -- as well as that pecker of wood.?

I ponder the paradoxical nature of my consciousness-bursting, day-breaking question.??

My mind's eye takes me to the craftily camouflaging potoo bird (family Nyctibiidae) -- steadily morphing into a part of the tree specifically where a tree is broken -- to entreat and feast for days on insects drawn to wounds in a tree's bark or branches.

As well, how the?koala finds these bracing spots the best place to get temperature?relief?(these tree bracing regions are several degrees cooler than the ambient Outback air) and 'reenergize' -- literally -- as the emf from the brace points is like a body-battery recharging station) to help to do the heavy-duty?digestive work of breaking down eucalyptus leaves and bark.??

Trees that open their bodies to?otherness?tend to survive.?For trees, not to leap from the ship of singular seed and fuse their roots to one another, is to die.??

The focus for tree well-being is on photosynthesizing with as many algal, mycelium and ephelia-mucilage symbionts (such as snails) as possible. They wildly play a game of life that cares little for individual players, and more about the game (umwelt?- ecosystemic wholeness) itself, and its ability to infinitely, fluidly perpetuate.

Let's acknowledge that to be correct is in a?very?real sense to seek to be isolated.?

To be incorrect or a little askew is to lean toward the communal, relational.

Real life survival is not safe. It is always found in the breach: skin breaks, bones get broken,?ligaments?stretch and tear.?To survive is to heal.

When told health is independence, is there a difference between well-being, healing and surviving?

Yes, care is vitally self-oriented (put your oxygen mask on first) yet letting the?joints sublux, cracking open space and experiencing fungal incursions also honors the body's material refusal to participate in a toxic, often ecocidal culture.

Health is an individual operation, still worshiping (or legislating what is 'correctness') at the altar of self-care (or sheer fear of the Other) exclusively -- is to ultimately sacrifice a greater capacity for well-being.