The land has been denuded of the trees on the country road leading to my house. The logs are being loaded onto awaiting trailers and taken to mills. They’ll be pulverized and recast as paper.

I wonder where the fauna will live now. The coyotes, deer, racoons, birds, possums, armadillos. I suppose they’ll join the previously evicted animals – the ones who left when my house and others in the area were built.

The sadness I feel is more than the death of the trees and the loss of habitat for the creatures. It’s that we live in a world that needs paper and houses and fuel – a world of consumption. How sad that the only way to live on this planet is for something else to die.

That’s the binary world of Earth. Ones and zeros. One is something and zero is nothing. One is alive. Zero is dead. Day and night. Tangible, intangible. Terrestrial, ethereal. Comprehensible, incomprehensible.

So what is the opposite of time? Zero? What is left when one is out of time, as are the trees?