“Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness. (Herman Hesse)
The following is a blog I originally wrote in October of 2020. In my conversations around and following the latest election, it seems to me that this may once more be helpful.
Many times when I start to feel wobbly about current or imagined future circumstances, I look to the trees. In addition to giving off an amazing energy, I’m struck with the reality that many of the trees I encounter have been standing here for centuries. We have changed and challenged their landscapes again and again, and yet, they are still here.
I wrote a blog series titled “Against the Grain” in the Fall of 2022. In the second installment, I discussed the way that trees shed whatever doesn’t serve in the Autumn. By the time they enter Winter, they look downright dead. This is about as far from the truth as we can get. In Winter, trees do a deep internal work. Everything that spouts in glory from a tree in Spring was germinated and nurtured to fruition in Winter.
As we move into literal Winter, and also a time in our life as a Nation that is likely to be quite challenging, I encourage you to carefully consider the trees:
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Tree Magic
I have a thing for trees. They just seem so magical to me. They hold all of this history, standing by while the world around them changes. Sometimes it seems almost like they have taken all of that in and recorded it in their core. When I walk on hardwood floors, especially very old ones, I feel a connection to the history held in the wood. First, I get a sense of the people who have lived in the home. I wonder who has walked those boards and what was going on in their lives at the time. Then I think about how each line in the wood is telling a story of what the tree “saw” while it was growing in the Earth.
Before You Call Me Cray Cray
Did you know that trees actually talk to one another? I am totally serious. The Smithsonian magazine published an article on this phenomenon in 2018. Here’s an excerpt:
There is now a substantial body of scientific evidence ...that shows instead that trees of the same species are communal, and will often form alliances with trees of other species. Forest trees have evolved to live in cooperative, interdependent relationships, maintained by communication and a collective intelligence similar to an insect colony. These soaring columns of living wood draw the eye upward to their outspreading crowns, but the real action is taking place underground, just a few inches below our feet.
Tree lady
That woman being hugged by the tree in the picture here was my mother. She was way ahead of her time on noticing the communicative energy of trees. When she was a teenager in the 1950’s, she used to go to the campus of Johns Hopkins University and spend time touching and, yes, hugging, the trees. My mother was a bona fide, literal, “Tree Hugger.” (That explains a lot, doesn’t it?) My father, a Hopkins Engineering student, criticized her mercilessly for it. He thought she was ridiculous. He only believed in “hard science” and “empirical facts.”
Um... Dad? You underestimated her wisdom and insight most profoundly. The scientific community just hadn’t caught up to her yet.
More than meets the arms
I can only hope that whatever therapists or spiritual directors with whom my mother worked embraced her love and understanding of trees. She found profound spiritual grounding in nature. She explored wooded areas with my daughter and with all of my niblings when they were little people. The more scientists study trees, the more my mother’s wisdom becomes evident. She wasn’t imagining things. Her connection with trees was not some weird woo woo wishful thinking. Trees. Talk. My mother could hear them.
Maybe it’s a German thing
As much as we Americans like to think of Germans in the narrow frame of precision engineering and rigid, effective scheduling, Germany was also the homeland of Herman Hesse, the poet who wrote the quote up above. Hesse often urged us toward a more spiritual connection, right there in the middle of rigidly defined German civilization. Germany was also the homeland of my maternal grandfather’s people. Perhaps my mother came by this tree intuition honestly.
“Intuition,” or more precisely, the fiercely logical but not linear data we receive from our gut-brains, is beginning to emerge in our scientific literature. “Hearing” trees requires it. We take them in sensorially…
The Old Answers Aren’t Working
I feel us emerging as a people here in the US. Our old forms and static understandings are no longer working. Our fierce dependence on linear logic, hierarchies and similar European Male- centric culture-bound concepts are no longer enough. As the voices and wisdom of people of color and of all genders are heard more and more in our communities, our politics, our businesses and our faith communities, our understanding of our world and everything in it is necessarily expanding. I am convinced that our healthiest way forward will embrace these expanded ways of knowing.
To those of us who have been entrenched in one way of understanding for so many decades, some of those solutions will seem as odd to us as watching a young woman in Baltimore hug the trees on the Johns Hopkins University campus in the 50’s. I will remind you... She wasn’t wrong…
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2024 and Beyond
So much has twisted and turned and changed since I initially wrote this blog. Because of all of that, I turn to the trees once more.
In his book, The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben, (yet another German person,) observes that trees use the communication patterns noted above to sustain an interdependent community, giving and taking in a way that sustains the health of not only the trees, but the entire biome. Trees create collaborative connections, keeping even cut off stumps flowing with chlorophyll and life. When a tree gets sick, other trees feed it and attempt to bring it back to health.
At the same time, some trees die off and become fertilizer. Only some are preserved. Our human experiences might interpret that as the kind of “survival of the fittest” hierarchy we employ. However, in tree world, the difference between trees that are nursed back to health and trees that are left to die is based on their level of connectedness. The more an individual tree collaborates with the whole, the more a tree sees to the needs of other trees, the more support that tree receives in return.
Wisdom in The Branches
Trees have a more impressive survival record than humans. I’m going to trust their wisdom and endeavor to learn from them. How will we best survive in a time of so much upheaval? By looking out for the entire community, collaborating for the health and well being of all those our human branches touch, and receiving the support those offer in return.
All things in a circle. All things affect all things. Sometimes the older ways make a heck of a lot of sense.