The Lives of Trees

Posted by Violet Snow Jul 4, 2007

I study them and hold up my camera, trying to figure out how to capture the detail I’ve noticed. A wistful calm comes over me, accompanied by unease, which seems to have two causes. One, regret that I’m not spending more of my time making this connection. Two, a sense of being overwhelmed by the admiration of individual trees in the forest. It’s one thing to be fond of the trees in your yard. It’s another to have a relationship with individual trees—lots of them—on the side of a mountain. To care about so many beings is frightening. I remember going to an amusement park when I was 19 and looking at the massive crowd of people and thinking that each one of them had intensely felt hopes and fears just as I did, even though they were all nothing to me. The shifting of perspective filled me with irony and confusion. I feel the same in the woods.

Looking closely at a tree, you can see into its past. The dead lower limbs, once green and slim, are relics of a tree’s childhood. The ranks of branches, intersecting in the air, speak of negotiation among a community of trees. The little curve in the lower part of a trunk implies that the tree had to compete with neighbors on one side for sunlight when it was young, but that the neighbors were downed, enabling the rest of the trunk to grow straight upward. The stump of a large limb tells of a collision with a falling tree.

They all have lives, struggles, victories, disasters, just as we do, and the traces of those events are borne in the angles and patterns of their bodies. Perhaps they do not have emotions as we do, but I find if I slow down enough, I experience a sense of affection and intimacy that transforms the way my mind is operating, gets it out of its plodding, worrying trajectory and into a state that feels healthier and refreshing. I feel nourished by the trees, and therefore I care about them, and therefore I fear for them because so much of nature is being abused. I am not speaking here against selective logging that blends with the cycles of growth and death. But I shudder as I watch excessive development adding toxins to the environment and limiting its ability to cope with change.

Sorry to get off on this morbid tangent. Here’s my advice: don’t go out in the woods. You might fall in love with the trees.