It’s that quiet time of year again, though today the wind is noisily buffeting the branches. Inside the woods it is still. The birds are less vocal. The mammal feet are silent. The snakes are still cold-blood sleeping. Even the babbling brook is silent under a thin icy blanket. I move slowly through the woods trying to stay present within this living room that surrounds me.

The trees have been bare for months now with light streaming in through the canopy. This leaflessness illuminates the American beech off in the distance with its watercolor pale brown leaves, curled tight. The one small hemlock nearby consuming all the light with its dark foreboding foliage. The light and the dark. The white pines flash bright green up high, overhead. Their russet orange bark still sticky with last summer’s sap. The mass of trees sway, open armed, in the sharp cold wind. Their canopies blending in a cluster of lines and angles, fractal shapes repeated against the bright blue winter sky.

The vines are clearly visible now upon the tree trunks and in the canopy. Roping, twining, twisting creatures –- using other beings to advance their own height. The hairy poison ivy vine clings tight to the trunk but seldom seeks so much light as to over top the tree. The ropey grape vine hangs loose from the branches way up overhead. Is it true they hitch a ride skyward on the limbs of saplings and so end up swaying freely in the wind like this? The English ivy bunches up around the tree trunk mid-way to the sky. Shiny, green winter leaves sucking up sunlight while they can. It tires the tree out, taking resources from soil, sky, and bark. My feet snag on the Japanese honeysuckle that runs across the forest floor. Clearly visible in winter. The adjacent ancient patch of running cedar holds its own ground and the honeysuckle turns away, seeking an easier path. A small area of vinca spreading out slowly shows the past human use of these woods – a homestead, a graveyard?

Then I come to the tattered edge of these woods, the sad edge. The disturbed place where vines fight for dominance and mature trees succumb under their fray. In this winter afternoon I cannot identify them all as they intertwine and co-mingle — some mixture of last year’s kudzu over the top of dormant porcelain berry with a hint of Asiatic bittersweet. Dead branches stick out at odd angles like broken limbs, and it doesn’t take any ecological knowledge to feel the imbalance here. This heavily curtained edge darkens the woods, creating a vertical face of light interference. It diminishes the frilly edge that would be in this place; the scrub-shrub forest edge that should run out gleefully to meet the field. This dark curtain is a slow-moving maw taking bites out of the forest. An imminent threat to the peaceful interior I love so much.

I turn away dispirited as this is not my land, therefore not my problem to address. But that doesn’t feel right either. In this age of private land ownership and individualism, land stewardship for the communal good doesn’t make it onto the cluttered to-do list. What if we could work together as a community, us humans? What if we knew the actual value, not just the cost, of saving what habitats we have left? What if saving the forest from the vine curtains had a quantified positive impact on our property price, on our planet’s health? What impetus would it take to switch our minds to a collective-failure or collective-success mindset on this one blue planet of ours? Am I failing in this planet’s stewardship if I sit by, knowing what I know, and allow my neighbors land to degrade like this?

This is just one of myriad problems that hurt my heart and head like this. Ecosystem degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, mental health, childhood obesity, social media, gun violence………… These are all inextricably linked, all symptoms of the one disorder. As we become more and more disconnected from our roots in the natural world, disconnected from our natural community, we struggle to thrive.

We depend on each other, all of us beings — all of us are a part of nature. Maybe I will call on my neighbor and ask if I can cut some of the vines for them; ask them to use their tractor to help mow the edge sometimes. Take some small steps towards communal good, reaching out a tendril of connection to my neighbors. Intertwining myself in this natural community of plant and human neighbors.