Talking to a stick is not much different than talking to a cell phone only the rate is cheaper and there are no long distance charges, meaning a stick is a cheap way of getting expensive things done. When you are talking to a stick, you are talking to everything the stick is connected to, which is a big place, some would say enormous, really enormous, like where extinction is a daily occurrence. Talking to a stick on whose dark end is a universe wider across than the township, a place where on an ordinary day six suburban planets get wiped out, somewhere out there, on the dark end of the stick. Then there s the big end of the stick, and you talking to it like you went to kindergarten together, and it connected to a super nova in Canis Minor, some way farther off big thumping as shook atoms and molecules out of a stray bunch of sparks. I can't tell for certain if John Muir sat by his fire talking to his stick, then listening while the stick talked.
Sticks do that after awhile, talk back.
Tell you how if you think you own the stick, you got another think coming. How every creature and creeping thing from the grass snake to the pocket gopher feels the same including the mollusk and the snow goose, bacterium, dinosaur and the oak tree. And they'd be right. This what happens when you're with a companionable length of stick. Next to a smolder, twilight near, chores done, it s you and the stick.