...This week I have lived like a tree, or rather, like I think it is to be a tree. I caught a cold, which made me deaf in my left ear for a while. I heard nothing but an incessant rustling, like a snowstorm raging in the distance. Just for a moment, I was beyond reach, cut off from the sounds that were so familiar to me. I repeatedly had to bring them to mind. It was as if I had to dig from the scrapbook of my past. I lived from inside a memory. I didn’t even hear it when someone addressed me and similarly, the not-being-heard was a strange experience for those who spoke to me. I was just like you: unreachable. Deafness is a shield that protects against painful noises, against words that hurt when they penetrate the ear. I am hearing again, yet the sounds stay strange and never heard even if they are caught in a head, a body, a wood full of life. This way, it is as if every cell listens to every sigh, as if every signal around me forces me to surrender to the compelling play of breathing and living.  

If ever I learnt something from this writing the already thirteenth? letter to you, it is to get to know myself as uncomfortably deaf, a desperate listener to a tree on a day like this... 

[ fragment from 'letters to a tree' 1996 ]