Who would’ve known that leaves have a sound. 

You can’t hear the sound of the leaves in the city. 

You can hear different sounds in the forest. Other sounds you can’t hear from the city. The hum of the flies. The wind in the leaves. Did you know that there’s a butterfly here that makes a noise? When did you last hear a hummingbird? They sing a song too. 

Shh. Quiet. 

A vehicle is coming, you can hear it. Tona, the 15-year-old adopted son of Jose, our friend and the Oaxacan man we bought our land from, arrives on an ATV. He’s putting the restaurant’s compost on the land in front of ours. We bought a 600 meter plot of land from Jose, who we met in his family restaurant that fateful day last fall. 

That’s not to say that they’re putting their trash in front of us. That’s to say our friend’s restaurant composts. There’s no label or advertising around this. They’re not vegan. They don’t have signs that toot their horn around sustainability. It’s just a local restaurant getting rid of organic trash in an organic, logical way for the locals who see this as their land to care for. We are in Mazunte, Oaxaca, Mexico. Our land is in this Oaxacan forest.

Tona is Zapotec. I don’t fully know what that means here. In Mexico, the indigenous communities are very much present, but to be face to face with someone fully from that culture is rare, at least in my experience. The story goes that Tona and his sister were mistreated and Jose adopted them, gave them food and shelter, called them his kids, and they work in the family restaurant. Tona and his sister speak Zapoteco to each other. They must have their own world together. Language frames reality, you know. But to everyone else Tona speaks Spanish. 

“I need to go to the bathroom. We didn’t buy the funnel.” Until we develop our plot of land, I love spending time on it, but it’s not entirely comfortable. 

“Is Tona still here?” Carlos responds.

“No,” I rush to say as I turn around to confirm. 

On the lot behind us, Tona is still there. Having put the compost on the pile of organics, that draws the vultures my husband hates, he is now on the plot of land next to it. He is sitting on a log table, eating. The only thing ahead of him is the trees. Tona doesn’t make a sound. He eats quietly, the trees bearing witness to him.

“Tona must miss home,” I say out loud to my husband. I say this with a lot of confidence. I am not surmising. I know.

BUZZZ. I’m interrupted by a green bug, stopping directly in front of my face, as if to stare at me. It looks like a type of fly but flies distinctly from it. It’s a distinct shiny, luxurious green. It stopped directly in front of my eyes for a moment. And I think we held eye contact for a moment, before it buzzed away. Whoa.

“Why?” Says my husband. “He was in a shitty situation, now he’s in a much better one.”

“Because no matter how flawed it was, it was still his home.”

Carlos hums and looks pensive in thought as he considers this. Tona will never be a Zapotec living among Zapotecs again, or at least it’s unlikely. I’m sure he misses things about being with his people. Maybe I’m wrong. 

“Maybe he just likes to eat here instead of at the restaurant,” Carlos, my husband, says. 

“Yeah but why? Maybe the trees remind him of something he misses. There’s a reason it feels natural for him to eat here.”

We both quiet in sensitive silence as only the sound of Tona’s silence filled the air. Many people would consider being in the forest to be in the “middle of nowhere.” A place with nothing to do, and nothing to see—a place that’s boring. But maybe Tona doesn’t see it that way, if he steals away from the restaurant while taking the compost and eats out here, perhaps this is something he really enjoys. He could spend his lunch on his phone, like most people do, but he doesn’t. 

Maybe he comes here to eat, the way we come here to hang out on hammocks for the day. That’s what we’re doing today. We had come for Carlos to do some work, but really, we actually rode off to our land, which only has a shack on it, to hang out on the hammocks and take in the land and its sounds. We like being here, it’s that simple. The land is intoxicating, it’s true. We come here—we’re moving here—because here we feel like we are not Sarah or Carlos, employee or business owner, winner or loser. Out here, we can just be. Being human beings here is enough. Another animal alongside the others. We’re nothing else to anyone out here. And that nothingness feels great. 

There is no such thing as silence. Even silence has a sound. I know this with someone who lives with chronic tinnitus in her left ear. Everything, even space, has a sound. A leaf twirling on the concrete has a sound. The palm leaves have a different sound than the leaves of the neem tree, both of which exist aplenty here. We don’t hear the sounds that often, because we’re existing on another plane when we’re in our fast-paced, busy worlds where no one has time to stop and smell the flowers, or listen to the sound of the trees.

We sometimes take what most call “nature” and what I call “land” to be neutral space. Space devoid of things. The more I spend time on land, the more I realize that land is not the minus of things. It’s the plus of things. 

I guess that’s why we call it nature in the US. In the US, “land” conjures up a feeling of a map, or a brown patch of dirt. The life existing on it isn’t something we consider to be there unless it’s called “nature,” which it usually isn’t except for if you’re referring to a protected park. We don’t see land as fundamentally living. 

I took on the idea to call what we usually call “nature,” and other spaces, as “land,” after reading a book called The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well by Thosh Collins and Chelsey Luger, two indigenous American writers who are married to each other. The concept of land I prescribe to can be best summarized by them: 

“What do you picture when you hear the word nature? Are people around you? Are you near anyone’s home? Or have you escaped to an area where it’s just you and a stunning landscape for your backdrop?…There’s a danger in the notion that nature exists solely as a pristine, human-free far-off swath of forest…when we view nature as a separate or other place, off in the distance preserved by a government entity within a delineated boundary, we support the idea that anything outside of that boundary is somehow not nature and therefore is less valuable and worthy of care or preservation…The capitalist notion of land separates it into two categories, natural and developed.”¹

Once I understood this, I couldn’t help but start seeing land everywhere. We were on our way to a city in this same state of Mexico called San Jose Del Pacifico. On the interstate, I listened to this idea of land via audiobook. Suddenly I saw the terrain around me, which is stretches and stretches but not designated as a park, as what Luger was talking about—LAND. Living. Breathing. Present.

The earth. The animals on it. The insects. The organisms.

Land, the earth, is literally all around us at all times. Whether a vulture is on a tree next to you or a mall. Suddenly, I could see how all of us, whether we liked it or not, are living not in New York or Tokyo, or Mermejita, or Chiapas. We’re all living on literal earth. We are perhaps not different at all, because we can’t divorce ourselves from the land no matter how we try. Some people just know this better than people who live in places where the clocks tick to the pace of the workplace as opposed to the pace of the sun. 

I started to see land in the city once I came back from Oaxaca during that trip to San Jose Del Pacifico, in a way I had never really seen before. Mexico City is less of a concrete city than New York, but concrete, it is still. And yet, suddenly, with my newly adopted dog Clara leading me outside more often than I ever had been in my own neighborhood, I discovered two orange trees in front of my big black apartment building. I found another, a bitter orange tree. A few days later, a guava tree. Then pomegranate. Then lime. More orange trees. More lime.

All around me was abundance in general but also abundance of land in a way I had never noticed before. I started dedicatedly making tea as I have been studying plants lately, and each leaf has different properties. Wow. Free fresh leaves for tea right in front of my house? A new friend later declined drinking tea at my house because she didn’t trust the leaves picked off a tree in front of her as much as she would trust something bought from a store. This disconnected from land, many people are.

Land is not nothing. It is everything, and everything on it. It is the birds and the bees. The vultures and the trees. Me. Carlos. Clara. We are not divorced from the earth. We are a part of it. Perhaps in this way we don’t come to our land to be nothing to no one. We come to be everything to the only people who matter—ourselves. Out in the forest, or a bit of land we can call our own, who can tell us how to be or who to be? It’s this freeing, being out here, on a bit of land we can call our own, where no one can see us, because we are alone.

Tona didn’t come to be in the middle of nowhere. He came to be somewhere. On the land. The sound of silence humming in the air. The company of the butterflies, the hummingbirds, the vultures, the trees. I mean, it’s a Sunday afternoon in a hip beach town of Oaxaca two days before New Year’s Eve. Perhaps we’re not that different. Carlos and I are laying on our hammocks as if there’s a TV to watch, the screen being the land. Maybe Tona comes here to experience this fascinating everything-nothingness too. 

Clara momentarily forgets herself. Tona was walking up the hill above us, and she goes lunging toward him with glee—Clara really likes Tona. I sometimes reflect on Clara’s excitement for everything but also for specific people, myself included. To Clara, Tona is a celebrity, she sees him, and her tail immediately begins to wag.

I’m not sure Tona feels the way I do, but with Clara, I know that at least one being in the world is truly and endlessly in love with me, for me, not for what I offer or what I have achieved in my life. Clara makes me feel important and lovable, because I am important to her and loved by her. To this small creature, in this big place with lots of beings but few people—maybe I am everything, at least to her. At least to someone. At least here. Maybe Tona feels the same and suddenly, I realize, maybe Tona comes here not just to experience the everything-nothingness of the forest, but to be the everything-nothing you can be when you’re alone in the forest too.

Carlos whistles for her after letting her celebrate Tona for a few minutes, and she doesn’t come back. Finally, as Carlos’ tone changes, she comes down from her cloud of affection for Tona and comes running back. Tona calls her back and for a moment she almost turns around. Tona laughs mischievously as Carlos gives him a playful look—I’ve realized here that old and young can be friends. Or maybe in community. Whatever you want to call it, it doesn’t really matter. In this place, the forest and the town, unlikely connections can arise from people who are people, not their jobs or belongings.

We realize that we are hot and Carlos goes to get some supplies from the hardware store on our motorcycle. Tona has left. Empty handed, Carlos comes back from the hardware store, saying all the hardware stores are closed for the holidays. 

I would tell you more about the silence, but at this moment, Carlos is hitting wood with a machete. It’s by no means silent. Have you ever heard the sound of a machete hitting an old wooden bed frame? 

We own two machetes, as well as the 600 meter plot of land, two hammocks, a dresser with emoji stickers on it (surely from Jose’s home), a broken bed frame, and everything else on this land—watermelon plants, hummingbirds, butterflies that make crumply sounds, vultures. Or maybe, rather, they own us. We humans really just make one world on this planet. There are thousands of others. Really, we’re in the minority, especially here.

But for now, I will enjoy the sound of the machete. And I will tell you what it’s like when I can. I will tell you what it’s like moving to land—the kind with a forest growing on it and vulture neighbors—as that adventure unfolds. For now, for today, I will enjoy being nothing and everything, at the same time.

Now back to the wild—or really, what we call, the present. 

1.  Collins, T., & Luger, C. (2022). The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well. Wielding Fire.