While washing the dishes last night, I thought about the day and realized I didn’t do any work. For the first time since January, I think. I went for a walk, started on and finished a (v slim) book, made dinner, started reading another manuscript. I sent no emails, wrote no (scheduled) posts on Google Classroom, made no progress on the story that has waylaid me from the novel and w/c I’ve miraculously been able to work on alongside the mountain of drafts we’ve workshopped the past fortnight. I had imagined, months ago, the morning after the last day of this long semester to be inaugurated by a feral scream. Then silence. Maybe tears from the exhaustion and relief at having survived. Two months ago, I started taking medication for anxiety; how it soothes my nervous system I still don’t quite sense or feel, although I have been, at the v least, able to sleep. Maybe anxiety is a sane response. E.g., to the photos of tree stumps that circulated online days ago, decades-old narras and baletes etc along Quirino Ave that foolishly stood in the way of the leviathan concrete car park that is Manila’s future. The pain that I feel whenever I pass by that area from Nagtahan to Osmeña is physical. I had grown to associate that part of the city w/ my call center days / nights, the shortest route from Manila to Makati, an area already haunted by the beauty of the old city before all the Skyway-related construction, and w/c today has become a horrid, dystopian non-place. Stumps are ofc potent, tangible remnants of violence. The v act of cutting is summoned by their shape, their incompleteness, the certain knowledge of death to w/c they testify. But the visceral response must not, as it were, miss the forest for the trees (sorry). The logic that trees can be acceptable–and legal–casualty to hulking concrete is ofc the logic of capital, how a private expressway that, for a fee, can facilitate the movement of goods and people, has more ‘value’ than a tree, w/c naturally cools its surroundings, w/c sways to the wind and sequesters carbon, w/c catches heavy rainfall and allows the soil to absorb floodwater, w/c takes decades to grow, surviving fumes and other human cruelties, w/c has life and enables other lives. In a lecture early this month (among the reasons for the aforesaid anxiety), rewilding was among the things I thought about, and I’ve been looking at trees and all manner of vegetal life around me w/ even more intensity and deliberation. Rewilding is strange in the context of conservation where it comes from; it ‘manages’ nature by essentially leaving it alone. This is ofc nigh-impossible in the city, or does our best hope lie in the Singapore model, subjugation that kind of masquerades as profusion and welcome, effectively positing ‘technical’ solutions to the decimation of trees. Or, as some have suggested, ‘just make the Skyway higher.’ Both provide shade and utility anyway? E.g., the homeless taking shelter under trees and around massive concrete columns? (Does this not resemble AI-is-inevitable we-must-live-with-it rhetoric?) I’ve been thinking about how the ‘reward’ for all the work this past semester is more labor, or, less cynically, circumstances in w/c my labor is not as precarious. What if, as that Instagram reel said, we were put on this earth to look at trees. This is, I know, naive and romanticist. The trees, in any case, will always be on our side.