The Giants in our Family of Life

 A couple weeks ago, tired of staying indoors, I drove to one of my favorite places, Kent Park. It was bitter cold and everything was blanketed with snow. The trails were too snow-covered to walk on, but the roads had been plowed. And I was hungry for the outdoors, despite the weather. I started to walk, looking down as I tried to skirt slippery patches, and reminded myself that this was good exercise even though there was not much to see except snow. And then I raised my head and caught my breath. In front of me and all around me were trees, standing strong and brave through the winter. But I had overlooked them, a strange thing since they were so huge. My eyes began to scan the immediate landscape, and I was awed by the variety of shapes, colors, and size of the trees. Sometimes they were tucked closely together, reaching upwards more than outwards in order to catch the sun. And then there were trees who stood more alone, reaching way out and up, outlined there against the gray background. These more solitary ones had room to create distinct patterns of branches, growing together in beauty and balance. Something about these trees standing through the frigid cold, wrapped in their winter phase, gave me such comfort. Here were hundreds, thousands of huge plants covering the hills and valleys. Life in the middle of winter. Not dying, like their undergrowth cousins, but standing tall and resilient through the cold until spring and new growth.

I started snapping photos of evergreens, oaks, willows, recording the curves and patterns of these trees. When I got home, I thought I would try my hand at drawing them. I also wanted to write about them, their intricate shapes, their stalwartness, their ability to survive through challenging conditions. But shortly after I drove home, my tooth started hurting. One tooth and then another developed an abscess, and if you've ever had a bad toothache, you know how difficult it is to think about anything else! Since then, I've been to the dentist four times, with the result that one tooth was pulled and the other one slated for a root canal. It's something called resorbtion, apparently found in older people, where the tooth begins to attack itself from the inside. I am forever grateful to the painkiller that has allowed me to endure this! But I have not been out for a walk until today.

This morning just before a big winter storm was due to hit, I decided to go walking again, this time to Oaklawn Cemetery. This cemetery is full of old, old trees, beautiful and widespread. And as soon as I got out of the car and began to walk, I caught my breath yet again. Today I was even more entranced by the trees than two weeks ago. They seemed miracles of nature, standing against the white sky in exquisite patterns of branches and trunks. It felt as if I could walk forever among them, captivated by their very existence. Here in the city, we are surrounded by large buildings and stores, telephone poles, paved streets, houses, cars, trucks and buses. And those man-made things are the ones we pay attention to. Yet everywhere there are trees, living giants standing much taller than anything else. Life forms many times the size of humans. If you let yourself actually look, it is an amazing thing, these huge plants growing everywhere among us.

So I started wondering about trees. When did they appear on earth? What did they look like at first? And I found out some fascinating things. When plants appeared on our earth, they were tiny at first. By 400 million years ago, the largest plants were giant mushrooms. By 350 million years ago, the maidenhair fern had begun to evolve into the first tree. In order to live through the winter, the early trees moved water outside their cell walls and converted starch to sugar in order to be more cold tolerant. 25% of all living plants on earth are now trees! Remarkable! 

Trees started growing taller as they competed for sunlight. Now the sequoia is the largest tree on earth. And the oldest tree today is a spruce in Sweden that is 9550 years old! As we know, trees are invaluable to our ecosystems, removing the carbon from CO2 to be stored in their tissue and returning oxygen to the air, for which we are grateful. They provide habitat for many plants and animals, and their roots go down deep to hold the soil as well as gather water and nutrients. 

Those things are all interesting. They give us some history about this particular life form and how it fits into our world. But it is something else that made me catch my breath as I actually focused on the trees during those two walks. They are living beings. Just like describing our internal organs and our appearance doesn't give a full picture of human beings, trees are made up of more than their scientific specifics. As we now know, plants do communicate with each other, respond to their environment, and are more complex than we might have thought. I feel the spirit of a tree as I am standing underneath its branches. This is not a technical thing, nor is it anthropomorphisis. At some level, I can sit under a tree, focus on it, and feel it. Feel its life and its personality. Not like a person, but like a tree.

It's no wonder that people through the centuries have honored sacred groves. Trees have been revered in many cultures. In Greek mythology, shy nymphs (dryads) live in trees. And at the center of Norse mythology is a central cosmic tree. In our "family trees", the image of the tree is used to connect generations of relatives. Though I have always appreciated trees, my hope is that I am now more sensitized to trees than I was last month. I want to notice them, honor them, and protect the ones I have the power to protect. I want to walk through a grove of mature trees and look to them as wise relations, and be comforted by their presence in the world.