If trees could speak | Elif Shafak

Transcriber: TED Translators Admin Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura

Humans do not see trees.

They walk by us every day.

They sit and sleep, smoke and picnic

and secretly kiss in our shade.

They pluck our leaves and gorge on our fruits.

They break our branches

or carve their lover's name on our trunks with their blades

and vow eternal love.

They weave necklaces out of our needles

and paint our flowers into art.

They split us into logs to heat their homes,

and sometimes they chop us down

just because they think we obstruct their view.

They make cradles, wine corks, chewing gum, rustic furniture

and produce the most beautiful music out of us.

And they turn us into books

in which they bury themselves on cold winter nights.

They use our wood to manufacture coffins in which they end their lives.

And they even compose the most romantic poems for us,

claiming we're the link between earth and sky.

And yet, they do not see us.

So one of the many beauties of the art of storytelling

is to imagine yourself inside someone else's voice.

But as writers, as much as we love stories and words,

I believe we must also be interested in silences:

the things we cannot talk about easily in our societies,

the marginalized, the disempowered.

In that sense, literature can, and hopefully does,

bring the periphery to the center,

make the invisible a bit more visible,

make the unheard a bit more heard,

and empathy and understanding speak louder than demagoguery and apathy.

Stories bring us together.

Untold stories and entrenched silences keep us apart.

But how to tell the stories of humanity and nature

at a time when our planet is burning

and there is no precedent

for what we're about to experience collectively

whether it's political, social or ecological?

But tell we must

because if there's one thing

that is destroying our world more than anything,

it is numbness.

When people become disconnected, desensitized, indifferent,

when they stop listening, when they stop learning

and when they stop caring

about what's happening here, there and everywhere.

We measure time differently, trees and humans.

Human time is linear --

a neat continuum

stretching from a past that is deemed to be over and done with

towards the future that is supposed to be pristine, untouched.

Tree time is circular.

Both the past and the future breathe within the present moment.

And the present does not move in one direction.

Instead it draws circles within circles,

like the rings you would find when you cut us down.

Next time you walk by a tree, try to slow down and listen

because each of us whispers in the wind.

Look at us.

We're older than you and your kind.

Listen to what we have to tell,

because hidden inside our story is the past and the future of humanity.