In an effort to bolster awareness of this and to encourage it’s citizens to help in creating a “city within a forest,” the city has mapped out all of it’s 70,000 trees, given each one a unique ID number, and invited residents to write the tree of their choice, with the tree actually writing back.

Here are some of the letters that people have sent in to trees:

“You’ve got to stop leaving your tree garbage all over the goddamn place! Every day you’re dropping crap on my driveway and I’m sick of finding it on my car and having to clean it off all the time. Knock it off or I’m going to chop you the hell down, I mean it!”

“For the last seven years you’ve stood outside of my front window. Each day I sat at my desk working and you were always there, my constant companion, and over time you became a symbol of my little house. Whenever I was really looking forward to getting home, and then would see you from down the street, I’d just relax, knowing I was almost where I wanted to be.  You always had a calming effect on me, and after all these years living in Melbourne I feel like you’ve been my best friend. I’m moving to London now, and I think I’m going to miss you more than anyone.”

“You happen to be at a really convenient location, in a park right between the pub and my flat. I must have pissed on you a hundred times over the years. Did it bother you that I did that? I never thought so. I figured you understood, and I always liked that moment or relief, leaning against you, my forehead and arm resting against your trunk, just the sound of my piss being absorbed into the ground. It was a timeout, you know? Anyway, I just wanted to thank you and let you know that you’re a bloody great tree!”

“My name is Randy and I’m in grade three. I really like trees and think they are important. You offer shade, help to make air and let animals live in your branches for free. Can you talk to the animals? Also, can you talk to other trees, and like in Lord of the Rings, will you be able to one day rise up and help fight against terror with the rest of the world? Thank you for all you do for the planet! You’re a hero!”

“Back in 1996 I carved my girlfriend and my initials into your trunk. He name was Marie Bell and we were just graduating from high school. Things didn’t last very long, as we both went our separate ways after school and lost touch. Anyway, I recently moved back to town to help look after my mother, and now I pass by you nearly every day. You always remind me of young Marie Bell, and so after nearly two decades of barely ever thinking about her, I think about her everyday. I wonder if she ever thinks of me, or even remembers that night I carved that heart around our initials.”

And then, two new mothers, each one wearing sweat pants and with a baby strapped to her chest, walked serenely down the street. They were almost glowing, almost hovering, and they walked in geisha silence, as if having moved passed language to an inalienable home that would be forever present.

(Photo by Lynda Hall)

Waiting on the beach was an array of kites billowing in the wind like an assembly of tents pitched at an outdoor concert. The surfers preparing to take them out to the water were all so beautiful, unselfconscious and sincerely indifferent to the world watching them, that they seemed holier, of a different order than the rest of us. Fully alive in their bodies, they had been seized by a passion around which their entire lives were organized. Working jobs where they could, they migrated the world seeking out the best combination of wind and waves. Mostly European, they were a tangle of different languages, their communication physical rather than verbal.

(Photo by Rob Hyndman)

Kite Surfing looks insanely challenging, and the surfer’s bodies, driven by their craft, were lithe, hard and practical. Even their children had a preternatural purity to them. Confident, little water bugs, they were free of tan lines and all shared these seraphic mops of hair, as if creatures from another planet. I don’t want to turn it on too much, but it was striking, even mesmerizing.

By the pool at the resort was an expensive looking black woman with the body of a Playmate. We made eye contact and I nodded toward her, but she gave me a dismissive and imperious look, immediately snapping her sunglasses down and scrolling through her iPhone. Later, when a man with an NFL build came by, she became animated and solicitous, eventually striking cheesecake poses for his camera.

Lying in a beach chair was a woman in her late 40s. She was wearing an intensely white bikini that offset her deeply penetrated, lurid tan, had immense fake breasts and hair that was dyed the kind of blonde that can only be synthesized in a lab. All day she lay alone, inert but for occasionally turning over. Every once in awhile her boyfriend, a man in his 50s who oozed vanity, would come by. Top-heavy like a body builder, he had meticulously attended sideburns that were the star of his face, and he walked about in a way that called for attention, which once gathered, he would lead back to his bronzed trophy who just lay there, waiting for him to need her.

The surfers didn’t seem to care if you saw them. Having fully committed themselves to something that they loved, they became beautiful. It was an accident, a byproduct of a physical and supernal devotion that contrasted sharply with those few there who saw beauty as a destination, something that lived on the surface,  could be acquired and then spent like money. 

And just a little further off, in the pool a woman was delicately immersing herself in the water. Her mother leaned over, speaking softly, “ We had a very tough Christmas, Jane was the nanny of one of the children killed at Sandy Hook and we’re just trying to put it all back together and find some light, you know?”