The Forest That Breathed

My father is a forest ranger, and he once took me to a part of Borneo that tourists never reach. He told me the forest there was old — not old like a hundred years, but old like millions of years, and that some of the trees could remember when dinosaurs still walked the earth. I pressed my ear against the oldest tree I could find and heard something. Not words. Not music. Just a very slow, deep breathing —...