featured photo: Valiphotos
An earlier version of this essay appeared on the author’s blog, Reweaving Earth & Soul.
In the chaos of these times, I find myself longing for the guidance of wise elders who appeared in stories of old: the grandmother who knew exactly what medicine was needed for your ailments; the grandfather who led the people through the mountains to the source of still-flowing springs. Alas, few such elders are available in most of our communities today. And for many of us who have lived into our senior years, we may fear that we have become elders without becoming all that wise.
Not all is lost, however, for wisdom and inspiration are available in the more-than-human community. Trees can trace their ancestry back for hundreds of millions of years before the existence of humankind. Amid times of great upheaval, trees have cultivated resilience, adapting and passing on information to support thriving forests. These wise elders are waiting to share many of the gifts necessary to lead us toward a future of deeper relationships and mutual wellbeing.
Trees are amazing contributors to the lives of Earth’s creatures. In branches, holes, and hollows, they harbor woodpeckers, owls, chickadees, warblers, squirrels, wasps, bees, and multitudes more. Trees are critical to the food web for insects, birds, mammals. They provide a wealth of nuts, fruit, bark, and leaves for hundreds of species of caterpillars and beetles – and for the critters who eat them. Below ground, they give away nutrients to mycorrhizal fungi in exchange for water and essential minerals, thereby supporting an amazing network of billions of intertwining lives. Through shade and transpiration, trees help to moderate high temperatures. Active participants in the water cycle, they slow and filter stormwater runoff into underground roots and streams.
In the words of forest ecologist and author Suzanne Simard, “The forest itself is part of much larger cycles, the building of soil and migration of species and circulation of oceans. The source of clean air and pure water and good food. There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature—its quiet agreements and search for balance. There is an extraordinary generosity.”
An extraordinary generosity indeed. In a healthy pine forest, older trees send support to young saplings via the underground mycelial network. When the saplings mature into hearty adults, they take on the mantle of providers, in turn sending nutrients to aging pines. (A lesson any aging parent might want to share with their children!)
Thanks to this approach to caring for the whole, pines may live six to seven hundred years in a forest. Yet lone trees often live only half the lifetime of those in a forest community. Could it be that these hereditary stewards of ancient ecosystems are lonely? “There is something profoundly wrong with a solitary pine,” wrote author Ben Rawlence in The Treeline, his chronicle of the boreal forests. He cites Native American stories of solitary trees “speaking” to humans of their loneliness, asking people to plant pine neighbors next to them.
One of many examples my coauthor and I shared in our book Discovering the Spiritual Wisdom of Trees explores another forest community:
“The roots of coast redwoods have a practice of what seems like holding hands. Growing in proximity to each other along the Pacific coast from central California to southern Oregon, they collect moisture from the fog that rolls in each morning. This location, however, leaves them vulnerable to fierce ocean storms. One might think that coast redwoods would have developed deep taproots to support their incredible height and anchor them securely in place; in fact, they have very shallow root systems. These giants remain standing through wind and rain because their roots are intertwined in a collective underground network that helps to stabilize all the trees in the forest. It turns out that trees have a rich history of collaborating for mutual benefit.”
Clearly trees embrace and thrive in collaboration and interdependence. But it feels like more than that: it’s almost as if trees long to be forest. Can it be that becoming forest is a tree’s calling? Not a monoculture plantation. A richly diverse, intergenerational, multi-species web of sacred beings, giving and receiving life and maintaining the health of Earth’s systems.
Imagine what it would be like to be a forest: Intertwined in life-giving exchanges with the multitude of lives underground. Trunks, branches, and leaves sharing food, habitat, and new life with insects, birds, mammals, reptiles. Dancing with sun to keep alive the carbon cycle. Cooling the air through evapotranspiration that seeds the clouds and brings rain. Cleaning and storing the rainfall, then releasing it to other plants and underground rivers. Purifying the air with all those beautiful leaves you have birthed, then releasing them each autumn to cover the forest floor where they will decompose and make rich soil from the nutrients you have created.
Forests remind us of what being community looks like.
The gifts of trees extend well beyond the boundaries of the forest. It’s not an overstatement to say that forests enable Earth herself to be the vibrant and life-giving planet that we know today. The amazing capacity of the forests to make both wind and rain, to serve as the lungs and the heartbeat of the planet, are examples of the astonishingly complex and critical relationships between forests and the entire Earth.
“Forests show us by example that separation is an illusion.”
Our “business as usual” story of competition, power over, survival of the fittest, individuality-at-any-cost does not play in the forest. Nor is it playing well in our lives. Not only have we made incredibly harmful decisions on behalf of forest communities, but we have applied competitive individualism to human lives with equally disastrous results.
Consider: our bodies do not have discrete boundaries. Our breath wanders on the wind to engage with trees and plants; rivers and rain course through us and are returned to Earth’s flow; sunlight transforms life-giving sugars to feed the bodies of trees, plants, mycelia – and us; trillions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses roam from eyelashes to gut, mouth, skin – to and from soil and surfaces – coming, going, developing, dying without our awareness – digesting, regulating, protecting, giving form to emotions, health, life.
Adhering to the myth of separation frays the threads connecting us to the web of life and feeds the great unraveling. We hold on to the story of individualism when the truth is we are Pando. Pando is a living system of aspen in Utah. It is the world’s largest tree by measures of weight, landmass, and species. What looks like 47,000 individual trees are genetically identical stems of a single tree spanning 106 acres. We look at Pando and see what we think we know. We accept what fits our story of separation and othering.
Aspen, Oak, Pine, Beech, Hickory, Hemlock. Trees reveal that tree, forest, underground network, water cycle, carbon cycle are unified. Not sometimes tree and sometimes forest. Interwoven in a vast communion so that “no thing” can be picked apart. Neither “resource,” nor “timber,” but wise and animate beings whose gifts to Earth unfold before us as we open to new ways of understanding.
Am I “tree” or “forest”? Yes.
There is no individual “me.” I am tree, forest, soil, sky, river, Earth, cosmos. As Thich Nhat Hanh has reminded us so brilliantly, the sun, the cloud, the rain – all this and more inter-are with every sheet of paper. Everything co-exists. There is no choice. “You have to inter-be with every other thing.”
It’s time to see with the eyes of my heart, to sit by the roots of a tree, gaze into her canopy, and ask the forest to challenge and transform my limited understanding.
Tipping the scale toward a future of mutual thriving will require a depth of wisdom beyond what any individual possesses. It’s trite but true that we cannot create steppingstones toward more vibrant, live-giving possibilities from the world views and stories that brought us business as usual. If we hone our awareness to hear their unique voices, forests may teach us to embrace our role as the younger species of Earth and claim our place in the family of things. How fortunate that we live in a world of wise Earthling elders who share from a deep heritage of thriving as community, offering wisdom we need for our time.
Comments (0)