what is the nature of these trees...

"It is the nature of a stone to be satisfied," wrote Mary Oliver. "It is the nature of a

river to want to be somewhere else." My soul is clearly akin to the river and yet I am currently considering what is the nature of a tree? The wetlands behind our home is filled with these friends as well as marshland, grasses, milkweed, asters, and goldenrod. I can't help but sense that in this season of suspended river living, it is time for me to let these trees become my mentor and ponder their deepest nature.

One resource is Maria Popova: in her on-going, on-line reflections, Brain Pickings, she regular writes about trees - and her insights are inspirational. Weaving together quotes from a wide-ranging cadre of artists alongside her own artistic analysis, Popova shares a weekly prose tapestry that is warm, vibrant, creative, challenging, and eclectic. Where else can you find visual art, poetry, links to in-depth essays and book reviews like this?

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most beautiful letter. “As a man is, so he sees.” Walt Whitman saw trees as the wisest of teachers; Hermann Hesse as our mightiest consolation for mortality. Wangari Maathai rooted in them a colossal act of resistance that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. Poets have elegized their wisdom, artists have drawn from their form resonance with our human emotions, scientists are only just beginning to uncover their own secret language. Robert Macfarlane — a rare enchanter who entwines the scientific and the poetic in his lyrical explorations of the natural world — offers a crowning curio in the canon of wisdom on human life drawn from trees in a passage from Underland: A Deep Time Journey (public library) — his magnificent soul-guided, science-lit tour of the hidden universe beneath our feet.

Popova led me to Herman Hesse's wisdom as well as the musings of Walt Whitman. She has published poems I would never find by myself as well as art that is breath-taking. And she turned me on to Peter Wohlben's The Secret Lives of Trees (arriving later this week) who offers more than a few answers to my question.

Why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach the forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer... Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover. Next time, perhaps it will be the other way round, and the supporting tree might be the one in need of assistance.... for a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.

Part of their nature, so it would seem, has to do with sustaining community. Trees apparently care for one another. Popova writes that writer Macfarlane: 

Marvels at the slim contour of empty space around each tree’s crown — a

phenomenon known as crown shyness, “whereby individual forest trees respect each other’s space, leaving slender running gaps between the end of one tree’s outermost leaves and the start of another’s.” In this, too, I see a poignant lesson in love, evocative of Rilke and what may be the greatest relationship advice ever committed to words: “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”

Trees also posses a long-view of time. Norman MacLean confessed at the close of A River Runs Through It that he is, "haunted by waters." I am not haunted by rivers - they feed me with their constantly flowing freshness - but I may be haunted by trees. They arrest my attention with their gravitas. They speak to something deep within me about patience, listening, and loving as I age. Their changing colors invite me to pay attention to the spirituality of the season. And trees quietly ask me to stay rooted in caring about the common good. One additional insight from Macfarlane that energizes Popova likewise captures my attention, too:

Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not to imagine these arboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees. I remember something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: “we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.” As someone lucky to live in a long love, I recognize that gradual growing-towards and subterranean intertwining; the things that do not need to be said between us, the unspoken communication which can sometimes tilt troublingly towards silence, and the sharing of both happiness and pain. I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings. Theirs, too, seems to me then a version of love’s work.

I spent sometime yesterday afternoon clearing bracken from the wetlands closest to our garden. I am heading out to do so again soon for the grapevine and bramble threaten to choke other more tender-hearted flora. When my aching back would summon me to quit, I would take a few minutes just to soak in the view behind me where the aspen, sugar maples, birch, and pine trees put on a show mixing yellows and reds with orange and green. For a variety of reasons, our social interaction will continue to be limited for at least another year. Neither of us is prepared to venture far from home until a vaccination is part of everyday life. These hills and trees are starting to tell me that now is the time to grow where I have been planted. As fall unfolds, I'm going to slowly learn more about the nature of the trees all around me - and listen carefully to what they want me to know.