on trees
I’m currently rereading Richard Powers Pulitizer prize winning novel The Overstory. If you spent part of your childhood in the late 1980s/early 1990s you may remember the movie Fern Gully and the television show Captain Planet; this book contains many of the same messages from those media. The biggest one which is: there is untold intelligence in nature that humans have yet to uncover.
About halfway through the book, a respected dendrologist is asked to testify as an expert witness in a case to stave off logging in old wood forest.
The judge asks, “Young, straight faster-growing trees aren’t better than older, rotting trees?”
“Better for us. Not for the forest. In fact, young, managed, homogenous stands can’t really be called forests.” The words are a dam-break as she speaks them. They leave her happy to be alive, alive to study life. She feels grateful for no reason at all, except in remembering all that she has been able to discover about other things. She can’t tell the judge, but she loves them, those intricate, reciprocal nations of tied-together life that she has listened to all life long. She loves her own species, too - sneaky and self-serving, trapped in blinkered bodies, blind to intelligence all around it - yet chosen by creation to know. (Pages 281-282)
I think many of us see the world around us merely as the stage and the props upon which we act out our lives. And honestly, when I pause too long to either zoom in or zoom out and I see the infinite delicate webs we participate in every day, I get overwhelmed. I understand the impulse to not pay attention. In fact, I’d argue that our brains literally cannot handle remaining perfectly conscious of every process going on around us. We’d become catatonic and physically paralyzed.
But using moments to see - to understand that we are not masters of all that we behold - allows for us to be grateful for both the mystery of this world and the power (and responsbility) we have in our consciousness.
People are not unlike trees - we don’t really do well in isolation or when surrounded only by those exactly like us; and we need the bones, resources, and wisdom of those that have come before us to grow properly just as much as we need water, food and sunlight.
Look outside your window today; I’m pretty sure you can see one tree. Can you think about a quality of that tree that you might want to emphasize in your life today?
Be well, beautiful people.
